Cultural Reverse 9781138330740, 9780429447679

Table of contents :
Cover
Volume 1
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
1 Introduction: cultural reverse and new patterns of intergenerational transmission
2 Intergenerational relations and their transitions: a historical review
3 Revolution in the depths of the soul
4 The break of behavioral modes
5 Artifact power not to be neglected
References
Index
Volume 2
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of illustrations
1 Social transition as the impetus to refurbish history
2 The peer group as knowledge reservoir and extended memory
3 The media: more about survival than information
4 What has been ushered in by cultural reverse?
5 Conclusion: state, society, and intergenerational relations
References
Index

Citation preview

Cultural Reverse I

The phenomenon of “Cultural Reverse” (文化反哺) emerged in the 1980s after China’s reform and opening up. In this era of rapid social change, the older generation started to learn from the younger generation across many fields, in a way that is markedly similar to the biological phenomenon of “The old crow that keeps barking, fed by their children” from ancient Chinese poetry. In this book, the author discusses this new academic concept and other aspects of Chinese intergenerational relations. In the first volume, the author explains some popular social science theories about generations, traces the history of Chinese intergenerational relationships, and, through focus-group interviews with 77 families in mainland China, comprehensively discusses the younger generation’s values, attitudes, behavior patterns, and the ways in which they differ from their ancestors’. The book will be a valuable resource for scholars of Chinese sociology and also general readers interested in contemporary Chinese society. Zhou Xiaohong served as dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Nanjing University for 16 years; now he is a senior professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Nanjing University. His main research fields are sociological theory, social psychology, and contemporary China studies.

China Perspectives

The China Perspectives series focuses on translating and publishing works by leading Chinese scholars, writing about both global topics and China-related themes. It covers Humanities & Social Sciences, Education, Media and Psychology, as well as many interdisciplinary themes. This is the first time any of these books have been published in English for international readers. The series aims to put forward a Chinese perspective, give insights into cutting-edge academic thinking in China, and inspire researchers globally. Titles in sociology currently include: The Way to a Great Country A Macroscopic View on Chinese Population in the 21st Century Tian Xueyuan Social Structure and Social Stratification in Contemporary China Lu Xueyi Social Construction and Social Development in Contemporary China Lu Xueyi Economic Transition and People’s Livelihood: China Income Distribution Research Zhao Renwei Economic Transition and People’s Livelihood: China Economic Transition Research Zhao Renwei Academic Experiences of International Students in Chinese Higher Education Mei Tian, Fred Dervin and Genshu Lu For more information, please visit www.routledge.com/series/CPH

Cultural Reverse I The Past and Present of Intergenerational Revolution Zhou Xiaohong

This book is published with financial support from the Chinese Fund for the Humanities and Social Sciences First published in English 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Zhou Xiaohong Translated by Tong Yali The right of Zhou Xiaohong to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. English Version by permission of The Commercial Press. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-138-33074-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-44767-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK

DOI: 10.4324/9780429447679

Contents

1

Introduction: cultural reverse and new patterns of intergenerational transmission

1

Intergenerational relations and their transitions: a historical review

38

3

Revolution in the depths of the soul

72

4

The break of behavioral modes

114

5

Artifact power not to be neglected

153

References Index

184 199

2

1

Introduction Cultural reverse and new patterns of intergenerational transmission

The process whereby the younger generation passes knowledge and culture to their living predecessors is what sociologists call “reversed socialization”. This involves a cultural flow analogous to the biological process of “crows returning nurturing to their parents”, which I define here—initially yet accurately—as “cultural reverse” or “cultural feedback”. This term, in its common sense, refers to the cultural transmission process from the younger generation to the older generation which prevails especially in a dramatically transitional society such as contemporary China. Zhou Xiaohong

Cultural reverse or a reversed cultural pattern? In 1988, ten years after China initiated its extensive reform and opening-up, I wrote down the above statement to address a social phenomenon emerging in China. Now, 42 years of reform and opening-up has transformed China from an age-old traditional society to a fairly modern one characterized by vigorous globalization and the socialist market economic system. The country has accomplished a succession of significant schemes proposed by Deng Xiaoping, the giant of the 20th century, with the gross domestic product (GDP) maintaining an average growth rate of around 10% over most of the past four decades, increasing from 364.5 billion CNY in 1978 to 99.1 trillion CNY in 2019. More importantly, the nation has undergone so extensive and profound a social reform that its political system, social structure, daily life, and zeitgeist—even people’s values and social behaviors—have all transformed accordingly, which is unprecedented in Chinese history; in fact, China’s transition during the past 42 years has surpassed in significance that of the preceding three centuries in total, both in terms of breadth and depth. Among the many changes now taking place in China is one that is evolving inconspicuously but gradually gathering momentum, that is, the shifting status of educator and educatee. While this was firmly settled in traditional China, it has now for the first time become blurred, or even reversed, with the younger generation becoming the indisputable vanguard of political, economic, and cultural reforms. In the face of the younger generation’s new values, different DOI: 10.4324/9780429447679-1

2

Introduction

behavior patterns, and somewhat nonconformist lifestyles, the older generation is perplexed and frowns, while at the same time more or less influenced and remolded by them. Some older people even go as far as involuntarily succumbing to their younger descendants. “This kind of ‘cultural reverse’ is an inevitable outcome of China’s involvement in the world integration through ten years of reform and opening-up preceded by ten years of seclusion. It is also a precursor of old China’s rejuvenation” (Zhou, 1988). When I wrote down these words about 30 years ago, I was a recent graduate of sociology. It was also the time when our fathers, who seized political power under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, had reached their declining years and the reform and subsequent societal changes brought new ideas and opportunities for the young to influence them. Today, the even younger post-Cultural Revolution generation has grown up, and, due to globalization and China’s great progress over the past 42 years, they are able to influence both their parents and grandparents. As the two American sociologists, Berger and Luckmann, wrote in their later influential book The Social Construction of Reality, the reality was the construction of a society, and sociology was to study the implementation process of this construction (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). The younger generation which survived the “Cultural Revolution” was committed to constructing a better society. Forty years later, today’s young people—known as the “post-80s” and “post-90s”—are also striving to construct a society in compliance with their perceptions, experiences, and knowledge, though with more resources available than their predecessors. So, what makes this recent 42-year history of China unique is the fact that, while the continuation of conventional society or traditional culture depends on the younger generation’s recognition and assimilation of the long-established social reality, every older generation in modern China—our parents and our generation—has struggled to adapt to this changeful world through acceptance and assimilation of the social reality newly constructed by the younger generation, though with occasional confusion and pain and reluctance. Take, for example, two events in our life. These two incidences or cases, at tenyear intervals, have obliged me to dwell on generational relationships and “cultural reverse” for over 30 years. They also epitomize how our generation influences our elders and is influenced by the next generation. As American sociologist Charles Wright Mills suggested in his 1959 work, sociologists must have “sociological imagination”—the intellectual qualities of using information to improve rationality and discern the world better; in other words, sociologists should have a capacity for perspectival transformation to be able to cover the most impersonal and indirect aspects of social change as well as the most personal aspects of the human self and see the connection between the two (Mills, 1959: 7). “The individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances” (Mills, 1959: 5). The two examples here, in Mills’s words, are indeed cases of individual anxiety or embarrassment, but someone with a sociological imagination can understand the social disturbance

Introduction

3

lurking behind them; in other words, the parent–child-relationship changes reflected in these two cases are actually a projection of social changes. The 1988 case occurred in my own home. On October 1, 1984, just a month after the Tiananmen Square parade, Deng Xiaoping proposed disarmament by one million to modernize and rejuvenate China’s armed forces. So in 1985, my father, a veteran of 40 years in the army, left the military and was officially discharged. In order to comfort these veterans who dreamed of regaling their military ranks, when the government changed the uniforms in 1985 (which was a transitional form for the resumption of the military rank system in 1988), it also gave each retired soldier, including my father, a clothing fee ranging from 1,200 CNY to 2,000 CNY. After receiving the money, my father, with mixed feelings, took out 200 CNY (in the mid-1980s, this amount was equivalent to a professor’s monthly salary) for me, a poor graduate student in Nankai University then, to buy clothes. But at the same time, he expressly forbade me to buy a western suit, because he and a large number of older people his age saw western suits as synonymous with a bourgeois lifestyle. In fact, at that time, I already secretly put on more “western” jeans at school, but in order to respect the opinion of the “investor”, I bought a Mao suit. Unexpectedly, only three years later, that is, in the Spring Festival of 1988, early on the first day of the Chinese New Year, my father, an early riser, dragged me out of bed and pulled me to his bedroom. As he took a suit out of his closet, I felt a shyness on his face that I had never seen before. “Can you teach me how to wear a tie?” “Sure! Oh, Dad, you’re wearing a western suit, too!” (Chang, 2003) Coincidently, just one year before, I translated American anthropologist Margaret Mead’s Culture and Commitment, and was deeply fascinated by her generational culture theory. Given this background, I was naturally deeply touched by the events that occurred between my father and me. The idea that the “concessions” the older generation was making to the younger one in terms of values, attitudes, and patterns of behavior—for example, they performed a U-turn on disco dancing, once seen as a scourge—around 1988 made me realize that something akin to what Margaret Mead called “postfigurative culture” had emerged in China. In such circumstances, I wrote a long essay with more than 10,000 words entitled “On the significance of contemporary Chinese youth’s cultural reverse”. In this essay, I used a very localized concept, “cultural reverse”, to refer to the phenomenon of the transfer of knowledge and culture from the younger generation to their living predecessors.1 I defined “cultural reverse” as “the process of extensive cultural absorption from the younger generation to the older generation in the era of rapid cultural change” (Zhou, 1988). The decade that followed, especially the years after 1992, was a period of even more rapid social change in China. However, due to the widespread “political turmoil” in the spring of 1989 and the gloomy social atmosphere in the following years, as well as the change of my own academic interests, I did not

4

Introduction

return to this subject for ten years. Then, in the spring of 1998, a trivial incident happening around me awoke my interest in this topic. In mainland China, computers began to enter ordinary people’s homes in the early 1990s, and the first machine I bought was a clunky Intel 80286 desktop computer. Then, in 1994, China joined the Internet as the 71st national network. By then, the Internet had connected more than 40,000 networks and 3.8 million computer mainframes worldwide. In the years that followed, more and more people in Chinese society began to enter the cyberspace known as the information superhighway: In the winter of 1995, Ms. Bu Wei, now a famous communication expert in the field of Internet research, came to Beijing Baishiqiao Yinghaiwei Science and Education Center, and listened to the first lecture on the Internet with a full house of children (Yan & Bu, 1997: 210). In March 1997, when I was writing my doctoral dissertation Tradition and Change—Social Psychology of Farmers in Jiangsu and Zhejiang and Its Evolution Since Modern Times, I also registered my first email address on the Internet, and sent the first email to professor Elizabeth Perry, director of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard University, which I visited in 1999. During those years, people could be heard talking and discussing computers and the Internet all over the campus. What is most exciting for the children of professors who grew up on campus is that many departments are now handing out computers to their teachers, making it possible for children to choose what Nicholas Negroponte calls “digital living” first (Negroponte, 1995). In March 1998, on the day just after the Spring Festival, the Graduate School of Nanjing University gathered all the graduate tutors in the Zhixing Building adjacent to the Graduate School to grade the postgraduate entrance examination papers of that year. This gave professors a chance to gossip as they did not see each other very often. Sociology professors were still discussing World War II topics raised by professor P, an “expert on military history”, whereas nearby Chinese professors discussed the most fashionable topic of the day: computers and the Internet. Interestingly, in their discussion concerning how to use computers and the net, my good friend Prof. Z, in the face of confident and unyielding colleagues, unexpectedly used what in his opinion was the most convincing refutation, “No, no. My son said …” Almost as soon as his words were uttered, my inspiration or “sociological imagination”, which had been dormant for a decade, was revived; in other words, I suddenly realized the “revolutionary” meaning of this sentence. Contrast that with the classic “My dad says …” or “Our teacher says …”, and it is no exaggeration to say that this university professor’s method of argument not only proved the emergence of new ways of cultural inheritance, but also heralded the arrival of a completely new society. To put it matter-of-factly, anyone who had observed society carefully and with some sensitivity could find that in the age of the Internet society and digital survival, parents were willing to “worship” their children as teachers in front of computers. It was but one example in a long line of events that had upended the traditional relationship between the generations of parents and children in our rapidly changing world. That same year, Guo Yuhua, an anthropologist in Beijing, felt that “children get more food information and knowledge from

Introduction

5

the market, advertisements, and their peers than their elders” (Guo, 1998), so parents often learned about food from their children. These examples and opinions inspired me to wonder whether we could prove the revolutionary changes in the cultural inheritance pattern within the family and even in the whole society through the description and analysis of such a series of similar events, and thus to review the completely different social and cultural changes between the current society and the previous one. Sensitive people may have noticed that I have used the words “reversed” and “revolutionary” many times here to describe the changes in intergenerational relations that have occurred in an era of rapid social change in China. It is true that in our age of such change, the end of many old things and the emergence of new things are more revolutionary than in previous times. Of course, the “revolution” here no longer has the violent overtones of the French Revolution or Mao Zedong’s era, and is no longer “the violent action of one class to overthrow another class” (Mao, 1967: 17). Many people before me have used the term “silent revolution” to describe the invisible changes in values and social behavior that occur during changing times (Reich, 1970; Inglehart, 1977).2 In 1998, less than a year after Dryden and Voss’s Revolution of Learning hit the market, books on the subject of “revolution” abounded: Revolution of Parents, Revolution of Students, Management Revolution, Education Revolution. It gave us a taste of the power of fashion, or trend, in a country where enthusiasm for “political revolution” had waned. I call the changes in the intergenerational relations of Chinese society over the past 40 years “revolutionary” because it unrelentingly overturns the father-guidesson parent–child relationship formed in traditional China over thousands of years as well as the whole relationship between the “educator” and the “educatee” in our society. As we all know, since the dawn of civilization, no matter what changes have taken place in society, or how different the contents of cultural inheritance and socialization are, the transmission direction and roles of the educator and the educatee are always fixed: In terms of the direction of cultural inheritance, it is always passed from one generation to the next. Accordingly, within the family, the parents always play the role of the educator, and the children always play the role of the educatee. The sequential nature of the two generations in the biological reproduction chain determines the inequality of the two sides in social education. In the social education process, “father guiding son” is regarded as the basic rule of cultural inheritance in all civilized societies. However, the above rule and its inherent rationality were challenged in all aspects after the reform and opening-up in 1978. Everywhere we see the phenomenon of the older generation being inferior to the younger generation as in the above two cases, and we find that this phenomenon of parental under-achievement not only affects most families (whether you are an ordinary citizen or a welleducated college professor, you are likely to be challenged by children), but also exists in almost all areas of social life, from values, life attitudes, and behavior patterns to the use of devices such as TV, mobile phones, and computers, so much so that we have to admit that, today, all of these changes between parents and children are truly revolutionary.

6

Introduction

From a sociological point of view, this unique phenomenon means that traditional ways of socialization are changing. In other words, socialization is no longer a one-way discipline process, but a two-way or even multi-directional communication and guidance process. If we say that the socialization of traditional society is mainly the education of minor individuals in society by adults and families, schools, and other social organizations presided over by adults, making them accept the values and behavior patterns advocated by the mainstream culture of society and develop the personality compatible with society, then, in the era of a great transformation of society and culture, those adults who have already completed the socialization process in the traditional way, in order to act in ways that contribute to the proper functioning of this changing society, must constantly experience the process of resocialization that produces entirely new values and social behaviors that are inconsistent or even different from those of the past. It is from this point on that the young generation, which embodies the new values and behavior patterns, is likely to become the educator instead of the traditional educatee, and to become the subject of socialization instead of the object. In the following section, I will explain that the above-mentioned “reversed socialization” or “Postfigurative Culture” as Mead calls it is a very common phenomenon in the modernizing changes that have taken place around the world following World War II, especially during the process of globalization. However, it is worth noting that the particularity of Chinese society lies in the following: First, it is a country whose tradition is deeply rooted and which has not been properly baptized as a modern civilization because of repeated internal and external troubles. After 30 years of isolation, stagnation, and even regression after 1949, the country suddenly faced reform and opening-up in 1978 to a very modern outside world. Such a sharp contrast made the process of the change of the older generation from “supremacy” to “backwardness” happen almost instantly. It also made the “subversion” of the traditional parent–child relationship in China more sudden than in any other country. Second, because of the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, only a handful of the post1949 generation benefited from Deng Xiaoping’s reforms and receive an elite college education at the end of their youth, and become the mainstay of society in middle age. Most of them have long since lost their youth and achieved nothing after revolting, joining the army, going to the countryside, returning to the cities, and being laid off. However, their children, born after the “Cultural Revolution” or the reform and opening-up, have benefited from the economic and social development of China and enjoy a good education and an environment of growth; they have almost become a know-it-all, omnipotent generation. Just look at this data: In 1977, China’s universities enrolled 270,000 students, with a gross enrollment rate of 4.70%; 42 years later, in 2019, the same universities enrolled 8.20 million students with a gross enrollment rate of 79.53%. In just 42 years, Chinese university enrollment has increased 17-fold, which means many Chinese families now face the embarrassment of having sons or daughters who know a lot and parents

Introduction

7

who don’t. Although the differences between the lives of Americans born during the Great Depression and their post-war children are almost as great as those of the Cultural Revolution generation and their children—parents growing up in an era of material scarcity, while their children live in an era of material abundance (Elder, 2002: 7)—clearly there is no great spiritual gap, from “closed” to “open”, between the two generations in America. The contrast between the material and spiritual lives of the two or three living generations is so great that the traditional parent–child relationship has been overturned more thoroughly in China than in any other country. Therefore, in the past 30 years, I have always believed that although “cultural reverse” or reversed socialization may not be a unique phenomenon in Chinese society, the post-1978 China must be the country where the “generational revolution” is most vividly expressed.

Intergeneration relationships: from a globalized perspective Obviously the topic we are discussing here is “generation” and the intergenerational relationship resulting from the coexistence of different generations. “Generation” is a biological fact, and it is because of intergenerational succession that humans as biological beings can survive to this day; at the same time, however, “generation” is also a social fact, because from the day of birth, every individual is bound to be subject to “generation”, an external and mandatory universal force—since he has his own parents, he will inevitably form an intergenerational relationship with them.3 Moreover, since modern times, many people have realized that “generation is the product of the times” (Zhang & Cheng, 1988: 15), or the emergence of a particular “generation” is often associated with people’s social or historical experiences, as is often said, “there are always two generations before and after a major historical event”, or as Alan Spitzer puts it, each generation writes its own history (Spitzer, 1973). In fact, we say that “generation” is a social fact also because “generation” itself is the basis of the existence of “society”, a community of people. In other words, the existence and continuation of the community itself is closely related to the existence and succession mode of “generation”. Augustus Comte, the father of sociology, argued that human beings could not live indefinitely, because that would eliminate the need for the next generation to emerge, and so the culture could not move forward, and nor could human succession be a one-off replacement of the old generation by a new generation, in which case culture could not survive (Atiyah, 1993: 5). Therefore, in Lesson 51 of The Empirical Philosophy, Vol. IV, Comte provided a lengthy argument relating that generational succession was the driving force of historical progress. “He believed that the tempo of this progress is determined by the tempo of generational change. Social progress exists only, according to Comte, insofar as it is based on death, as the eternal renewer of human society” (Jaeger, 1985: 275). Following Comte, Simmel also thought that this kind of generational change, which was not achieved overnight, was a sociological phenomenon of great significance. Simmel’s views influenced his student Karl Mannheim. In 1930, this German sociologist argued in “The

8

Introduction

Problem of Generation”, later regarded as the seminal work of intergenerational sociology, that all societies had these five characteristics: (a) new participants in the cultural process are emerging, whilst (b) former participants in that process are continually disappearing; (c) members of any one generation can participate only in a temporally limited section of the historical process, and (d) it is therefore necessary continually to transmit the accumulated cultural heritage; (e) the transition from generation to generation is a continuous process. (Mannheim, 1952: 292) Mannheim sought to make known the ingenius insight of Comte and Simmel that the characteristics of human society and its cultural heritage were determined by the characteristics of generations, and that without generations, there would be no changing and developing society like ours. Furthermore, the reason why “generation” or “intergenerational relationship” as a social fact becomes a problem is not only related to the emergence of industrial society or modernity—or to put it simply, the problem of generation is essentially a problem of modernity—but also has something to do with globalization, which is becoming more and more noticeable now. “Generation” and “intergenerational relationship” have a very complex implication relationship with modernity and globalization because “globalization” itself is a continuation of the study of “modernity”, what Giddens called the “amplification” of modernity; or modernity is inherently global—as Giddens said, modernity is undergoing the process of globalization internally (Giddens, 1990: 63). In brief, starting around the 17th century, Europe began to surpass the rest of the world in ideology, military power, navigation technology, and economic development. The emergence of industrialization, urbanization, and a series of new phenomena representing the rationalization of bureaucracy and division of labor, which we call “modernity”, led to the amazing transformation of European society, and it quickly spread this new system around the world, which was the logical starting point of today’s era of globalization (Cohen & Kennedy, 2000: 42).4 In fact, the origin of globalization has always been a controversial topic. One theory is that globalization can be traced back to the origins of civilization itself, so it is at least 5,000 years old. Indeed, the earth began to shrink as people living in different regions tried to come into contact with each other through war, trade, and migration. The second theory, which comes closest to our view of systems of the world, is that globalization began with the development of capitalism in the 16th or 17th century. In the centuries that followed, the decisive changes in industrial relations and the great technological innovations that followed encouraged capitalism to spread around the world, and a new type of economic and social relations swept the globe. The third theory is that globalization began with the great recession in the West in the 1970s, which destroyed the dream of an international economic order in the developing world and allowed the rich world to shake off the old Ford-style industries and

Introduction

9

move to more flexible capital- and technology-intensive production. Mittelmann referred to the periods of globalization corresponding to the above three views as the “early stage of globalization”, the “transitional stage of globalization”, and the “accelerated stage of globalization” (Mittelmann, 2002: 23–24). Although there are others who divided globalization into stages of two (Yan, 2003) or four (Held et al., 2001) or five (Robertson, 1990), it is generally accepted that the emergence of Western capitalism in the 17th century and its subsequent global spread is the most basic meaning of globalization. When we say that the generation problem is a modern problem, there are at least two relevant arguments here. One is that generational or intergenerational relationships are problematic as a result of industrial society or modernity. It was the emergence of the modern industrial society that changed the idyllic, slow-moving world to a considerable extent, making it change greatly from the previous world in many ways, among which industrialization and urbanization were the embodiment of rationalization. The emergence of industrialization or industrial society destroyed the traditional agricultural society and its social structure, causing a large number of young farmers to come out of the countryside and flood into the increasingly complex cities, which challenged the authority and status of the older generation, who had previously held sway in the family. In other words, the disjunctiveness or discontinuity between generations caused by the transition from traditional society to modern society made the contradiction and conflict between generations become an emergent social reality. In this case, or “only at the beginning of the 19th century—possibly because it was a time of accelerating historical change,” “a strong interest in the succession of generations as it might be relevant for social and cultural-historical phenomena manifested itself” (Jaeger, 1985: 274). The poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe showed his interest here, writing in the preface to his autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit: Simply being born ten years earlier or later can make a big difference in a person’s education and scope of action (Goethe, 2004). Durkheim, a little later than Goethe, also showed his interest. He saw the problem with the transmission of values and social behavior between previously peaceful generations to lie in the process of industrialization from mechanical to organic solidarity; he also saw the potential opportunities for social progress that lurked beneath this problem. To that end, he warned soberly: The feeling he has for them lasts, and, consequently, it produces the same effects, that is to say, restrains the desire for innovation. To produce novelties in social life, it is not sufficient for a new generation to appear. It is still necessary for them not to be strongly impelled towards following in the footsteps of their forefathers. The more profound the influence of these latter—and it is as much more profound as it lasts longer—the more obstacles there are to change. (Durkheim, 1933: 294) Second, we say that the generation problem itself is a modern problem also because the generation problem is related to the establishment of European

10 Introduction nation-states in modern times. The emergence of the nation-state is regarded by Giddens as the result of the transformation of the state in the process of modernity, or the nation-state is one of the indicators of modernity. The comparison on this issue is with early sociology. In the initial stage of sociology, the concept of society was actually an image of order, which was closely related to the emergence and general success of nation-states in modern times (Cheng, 2004). Much like the history of early sociology, the formation of nationalism and the nation-state in modern Europe gave birth to the initial generational consciousness. As we all know, Europe’s first nation-states were born of conflicts between church and state (Xu, 1994). Since the Middle Ages, from the 12th century, the royal power of Western European countries had been strengthened, and the embryonic form of nation-states in Britain, France, and other countries in the 15th and 16th centuries was basically formed. Around 1870, Germany and Italy, which had been falling apart, were reunited under the hands of Bismarck and Mazzini respectively. In the formation of the nation-state, the surging nationalist movement, like the French Revolution, inspired generations of young Europeans, who, from this movement, found the expression to oppose tradition and a way of resisting it. The sheer scale of the youth movement, in turn, contributed to intellectual research on the “generational” problem, leading to a sense that it might be the key to understanding the political upheavals rocking Europe (Atiyah, 1993: 4). The Austrian historian Ottokar Lorenz, for example, had been popularizing the so-called pulse-rate hypothesis since the late 19th century (Jaeger, 1985). In his view, the transmission between generations was like the transmission of physical quality, and the task of historians was to find those great figures who had influenced a generation, because it was from them that endless generations were born. Like other German scholars of the time, Lorenz’s interest in intergenerational genealogy was influenced by his strong nationalist zeal. From there, Lorenz continued to explore the continuity of the German nation that he saw as the basis for German unification in 1871. The emergence of the generation problem is the product of modern industrial society or modernity. The global expansion of the generation problem in the 20th century is also the result of the worldwide advancement of modern industrial society or the capitalist system. From the first half of the 20th century, not only Europe, including the Americas and Asia, but also other countries that developed or began to come into contact with modernity encountered generation problems. This started with the United States, which itself was a new country of European immigrants. The migration to America, which began with the Mayflower sailing to Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620, reached its climax in the 1930s due to the rise of Nazi Germany. In 1928, the Chicago School sociologist Park saw that the movement and migration of peoples, the expansion of trade and commerce, and particularly the growth, in modern times, of these vast meltingpots of races and cultures, the metropolitan cities, has loosened local bonds, destroyed the cultures of tribe and folk, and substituted for the local

Introduction

11

loyalties the freedom of the cities; for the sacred order of tribal custom, the rational organization which we call civilization. (Park, 1928: 889–890) In the initial global expansion of this modernity, Park discovered a confrontation between tradition and modernity in people’s values and social psychology. He borrowed the concept of “stranger” from Simmel’s 1908 essay (Simmel, 1950: 352–358) and called such a personality state “marginal man”. Unlike Park, anthropologist Jeffrey Gorer observed that this marginality that existed in the same person were sometimes seen between the more traditional parents and the more modern offspring. Specifically, by moving to a new environment, American parents lost the authority of their European parents and were often rejected by sons who were more adaptable to the new life (Gorer, 1948). The growth of Chinese social modernity began in 1840, which was accompanied by numerous sufferings and humiliations. In the 20th century, the 1911 revolution and the May Fourth movement in 1919 not only ended more than 2,000 years of feudal autocratic rule in China, but also began to shake traditional culture which had Confucianism as the core as well as the feudal patriarchal system. Furthermore, as the transformation of Chinese society towards modernization gradually deepened into the level of values and social psychology, intellectual leaders including Chen Duxiu began to propose the idea of an era of rebuilding the value system (Mao, 1996: 301), which was to affect intergenerational relations. In fact, the founding of the New Youth in 1915 meant that the younger generation of Chinese society was bidding an unhesitating farewell to the older generation and the era they represented. In modern Chinese literature, there are numerous works describing the “farewell scene” of the two generations in the era of great change: In his book The Thunderstorm (Ba, 2006), Ba Jin accused the feudal patriarchal system represented by Sir Gao through the mouth of Chuehhui and Chuehming to have stifled human nature. Bao Boyi, who grew up in the United States, was also able to skillfully and vividly illustrate the continuous intergenerational conflicts in Chinese society from the end of the 19th century through the succession of five generations of two big families in Spring Moon (Bao, 1986). Compared with writers, sociologists’ work lack extensive detail and vivid descriptions, though there is in-depth observation. In the 1940s, Fei Xiaotong wrote a special chapter in the Reproductive System to discuss the estrangement and conflict between parents and children caused by the clash of old and new cultures in Chinese society: “Children can often feel their parents’ excessive interference to be unreasonable and even oppressive, so parents represent cannibalism. Parents, on the other hand, find their children stubborn, disobedient, and uncompassionate, even rebellious, unfilial, and treasonous” (Fei, 1998: 208). Although Fei Xiaotong, then a father, knew how hard it was to be a parent, he used the story that the filial Nietzsche eventually rejected his mother’s desire to convert him to God to prove that the thin emotional line between parents and children was vulnerable to the winds of the times:

12 Introduction One of the tensest scenes of social change plays out between parents and children. At this time, the storm blows off the bond, and there are no longer fathers and sons, but enemies. The encroaching of modern Western civilization was fomented to burst out in the May 4th movement, and “nonfilial piety” was part of this initial influence. Was it accidental at all? The continuity of culture depends on the transmission between generations, for which the society has attached various implications to the parent–child relationship. But culture is not just continuous, it needs constant change, so the implications are cut off bit by bit with blood and tears. (Fei, 1998: 210) The intergenerational separation or “cutting off” of intergenerational relations did not end here. After World War II, intergenerational contradictions and conflicts became more and more severe. The surviving Western capitalist society, with the power of the new scientific and technological revolution and a series of necessary and inevitable social policy adjustments, not only came back to life, but also entered a new “golden age”. Electronic technology, biological technology, laser and fiber-optic communication technology, marine engineering, space development, and the utilization of new materials and new energy resources, which are all based on electronic computers, have changed the relationship between human beings and nature beyond any possible reversal. And all kinds of changes always breed intergenerational conflicts and endow them with new tension. In the 1950s in the U.S.A., the so-called “beat generation” constructed their own youth subculture and fought against the political barriers of McCarthyism through such youth idols as Marlon Brando, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, and Allen Ginsberg, as well as through jeans, T-shirts, and rock ’n’ roll; occasionally they expressed themselves in the form of street disturbances (Lindner, 1988: 47). However, on entering the 1960s, this “youth rebellion” symbolized by generational fracture spread in the United States, Europe, Japan, and many third-world countries, forming a global outcry against capitalism. This historical process began with the “freedom of speech movement” initiated by students at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964, and reached its peak in the anti-war movement against the American invasion of Cambodia, which was launched in 1970. Important landmarks of the youth rebellion movement included: the campaign against the Vietnam War in 1965, initiated by University of Michigan students; the outbreak of the mammoth May Events in France in May 1968; and the rock concert attended by nearly 500,000 people at Woodstock, New York State, in August 1969 (Fraser, 1988; Quattrocchi & Nairn, 2001; Ali, 2003). Coincidently, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, China, which had been closed to the outside world since 1949, unconsciously echoed the global action of young people all over the world. The Cultural Revolution of 1966 was famous not only for the scale of the participation of tens of millions of people, but also for the imperative that “the revolution is innocent and the rebellion is right”, which became the guiding principle for the action of young people in Europe and America. However, the revolution in China had a very different

Introduction 13 purpose and meaning from the student rebellion in Europe and America, so that the Left worldwide found themselves deeply frustrated when they finally understood the inside story of this revolution decades later (Klatch, 2001: 434; Fu, 2004). There are various reasons and triggers, including some accidents and misinformation, for the global youth insurrection movement represented by the student uprising in 1968. A careful analysis, however, reveals that all its causes lay dormant in the postwar transformation of capitalism from that of an industrial to a post-industrial society. In other words, the youth revolt of 1968 was the inevitable result of the growth and advance of capitalism or what we call “modernity” on a global scale. The global anti-war upsurge, the young generation’s disappointment with the existing system of capitalism, and their pursuit of individual independence, and the changes in the social structure of capitalism after the war, were all causes of this youth rebellion. We cannot go into the full extent of the causes of the 1968 global youth revolt, but it is worth sketching them out. America’s invasion of Vietnam in 1961 was, as many have seen, the trigger for a global youth revolt. The immediate purpose of the U.S. invasion, as Eisenhower put it, was to contain the expansion of communism in Southeast Asia, but it was fundamentally driven by capitalism’s deep-rooted tradition of global expansion and economic interests. It was this tradition and instinct that made the United States willing to violate its own principles of national equality and self-determination that it had advanced at the end of World War I. As the Vietnam War spread, the number of American soldiers fighting grew from 40,000 to 550,000 in 1969, using every modern means of slaughter except the atomic bomb. The bitterness of the war, America’s atrocities in Vietnam, the moral hypocrisy of America’s “holy war” propaganda, and, especially, the fact that more and more youth were being sent to the battlefield as cannon fodder worked together to exert a significant impact on American youth and intellectuals, causing them to reflect on American values and the social system. Students at Yale University were the first to do this. When the Students for Democracy Society (SDS), a left-wing group centered on students from the University of Michigan, intervened in 1965, the anti-war movement gained momentum. On April 17, 1965, when the SDS organized the first large-scale anti-war demonstration in Washington D.C., tens of thousands of students gathered in front of the Washington Monument to denounce U.S. policy regarding the Vietnam War (Xu & Zhu, 2004: 94). In mid-October, the SDS organized another, bigger demonstration in 90 cities across the country, with 100,000 people in Washington D.C. alone. In a series of demonstrations in this year, American students left behind scenes that are historic: Tens of thousands of them marched through Washington chanting, “Hey, Johnson! How many more young men have you killed today?” They marched around the White House holding the flag of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) to collect blood for North Vietnamese soldiers; David Miller, 22, publicly burned his draft card on October 15 in a public display of defiance of the U.S. draft law (Manchester, 1980: 1479–1480). From

14 Introduction there until the mass demonstrations in Chicago in 1968, more than 2,000 student protests broke out across the country (Xu & Zhu, 2004: 105). More importantly, the protests echoed across the Atlantic, with large student anti-war movements happening in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and even Franco’s Spain around 1968. The anti-war movement, which lasted for several years, culminated in the march by 1.5 million American students against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in 1970. In fact, such external events as the American invasions of Vietnam and Cambodia were only the fuse for the great youth insurrection movements in Europe, America, and the world; the real motivation behind it or the inner ammunition was actually the capitalist system itself, which had gone through centuries of development. It was the young students of the “New Left” who formed the SDS and who were the first to be acutely aware of the incompleteness of the system. In 1962, Tom Hayden, a journalism student strongly influenced by sociologist C. W. Mills, drafted the Port Huron Statement to assail American social reality. With the amazing insight of the younger generation, the Statement saw the profound crisis hidden behind modern industrial civilization and the consumer society represented by the United States—the over-development of science and technology based on instrumental rationality, which produced weapons of mass destruction and placed the whole world under the threat of the nuclear arms race, and at the same time formed the unlimited development, utilization, and consumption of natural resources, further worsening the ecology and making human beings move towards “one-dimensional” development. Therefore, Hayden called on humanity to develop a genuine “individualism”, free from the control of excessive instrumental rationality (Sale, 1973: 51–52). The Port Huron Statement not only quickly found a large number of spiritual advocates in the United States, but also quickly gained an echo in France. Like the United States, France, which was moving toward a highly developed industrial society, had seen rapid growth in higher education in those years: In the ten years between 1958 and 1968 alone, its university population exploded from 170,000 to 600,000 (Quattrocchi & Nairn, 2001: 135). With so many people gathered at university, a product of modernity, it was no wonder Alain Touraine posed the question: If knowledge and technological progress really were the engines of the new society, just as capital accumulation had been the engine of the old one, didn’t universities occupy the same place in society as big companies had done in the past (Quattrocchi & Nairn, 2001: 203)? Touraine’s point was clear: If the working class was the champion of industrial society, then students were the rebels of post-industrial society. Indeed, in 1968, French students went from dissatisfaction with higher education to questioning and rebelling against the whole capitalist system. On a spring day in May, when both the season and the social mood were bright, a large group of students, who were thought to have been docilely integrated into capitalism, revolted at the heart of society. Not only did they erect barricades reminiscent of the French Revolution of 1789, but they ended up mobilizing nearly 10 million workers. These workers joined so as not just to raise wages, but to fight against the whole system of the factory: the arbitrary control of the management and the enslavement of

Introduction 15 human beings by machines (Ali, 2003: 112). In short, they were against everything incurred by modernity! The revolution on the streets of France was also reminiscent of Tocqueville’s startling assertion made more than 100 years ago: A revolution may occur when the economic conditions of a society are improving (Tocqueville, 1997: 64). It also gave people a chance to finally see that, for the first time in history, the revolution was not just for bread, but also for roses (Quattrocchi & Nairn, 2001: 23). In fact, at the time of the May Events in France in 1968, a studentwritten poster displayed at the main entrance of Paris University-Sorbonne, like that of the Port Huron Statement of the SDS, revealed the full meaning behind the intergenerational revolution that swept the world in 1968, namely that the then current revolution was questioning not only capitalist society but industrial society as well; that consumer societies were doomed; that there would be no more social alienation; that they were inventing a creative society; that imagination was seizing power (Quattrocchi & Nairn, 2001: 132). It has been more than 50 years since the youth uprising of 1968. Negative comments about the “revolution” are not uncommon, though. Some call the 1960 generation the “destructive generation” (Collier & Horowitz, 2002), others call the May Events in France a “false revolution that changed everything”, still others say that students object not to a consumer society, but to problems in it, especially their disadvantaged position. But in any case, people agree with Eric Hobsbawm that the significance of 1968 for the first world is that social change has accelerated dramatically since then (Hobsbawm, 1998: Preface). In addition, 1968 left many other positive legacies. For example, it promoted the reform of higher education in Europe and America, hastened the end of the Vietnam War, changed the lives of women and black Americans, and promoted the European and American countries’ ecological movement and the emergence of green parties (Xu & Zhu, 2004). In fact, as far as we are concerned, it is also the intergenerational revolution of the 1960s that changed or upended traditional intergenerational relations. The most valuable result of this change or disruption is a new form of intergenerational cultural transmission that Margaret Mead called “Postfigurative Culture”, a cultural transfer process in contrast to the traditional “Prefigurative Culture”; that is, the transfer of knowledge and culture from the younger generation to their living predecessors (Mead, 1970). In the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, there began to be a kind of concession by the older generation toward the younger generation, which later became more prevalent in China. Many Americans over 30 wanted to be young again and share the trends and passions of youth (Manchester, 1980: 1554). From pop songs, Watusi dance, discos, gliding dance, Frisbees, jeans, and the Beatles’ pioneering long hair, to perhaps individualistic and liberal values, all began to spread from the young to the middle-aged. Of course, this paradox of rebelling against a consumer society and eventually succumbing to it gave the old system the opportunity to join forces with a consumer society to stifle the 1968 revolution.5 It was also responsible for this revolution and rebellion, in the end, changing nothing but the way of life.

16 Introduction Instead of dying as a result of the student revolt of 1968, capitalism accelerated its global advance or expansion over the next 50 years. When many people talk about globalization, they clearly point out that it is, first and foremost, economic globalization. Without the eternal fascination with market exploitation and capital reproduction, the capitalist economy could neither generate the colonial impulse that began 400 years ago, nor sustain today’s increasingly strong desire to find new business opportunities in new regions and fields. Of course, for capital, technology, goods, services, and labor to integrate effectively across national and regional boundaries on a global scale requires a series of synergies, otherwise there will result a set of matching outcomes, outside the economic sphere. For example, globalization accelerated the flow of information through the electronic medium, making instant communication possible all over the world; the Internet and the resulting rise of the “network society” (Castells, 2010a) made McLuhan’s “global village” (McLuhan, 1960) a reality. Another example is the cross-border movement of capital and people, which make national boundaries disappear or become blurred in many parts of the world. This not only challenges the form of the nation-state as it has existed since modern times, but also creates for people an identity crisis. For example, when such new things as Disneyland, McDonald’s, KFC, Starbucks, and rock music in the consumer field are embedded into the lives of people in other countries, especially the young people, along with globalization from the United States, they will naturally cause conflicts and collisions between cultures while changing people’s values and lifestyles. In fact, the daily significance of globalization lies in that it makes human activities break through the boundaries of time and space and form a global interdependence, which enables “the intersection of presence and absence, the interlacing of social events and social relations ‘at distance’ with local contextualities” (Giddens, 1991: 21). Nearly half a century ago, the gifted Mills realized that the history that affected everyone today was the history of the world, and the sociological imagination was about letting people know the intricate connections between their own patterns of life and the course of world history (Mills, 1959: 4). Now, as globalization becomes a more and more distinct historical process, the generational problems and intergenerational contradictions discussed here are also gradually becoming globalized, gradually becoming a trend and challenge that transcends national boundaries, and no longer rooted in the established territory or local situation. The impact of globalization on intergenerational relations is manifested in at least two aspects. One is that people of different generations living in different countries and regions of the world often face the same or at least similar social backgrounds or environments, and are naturally affected or disturbed by the same social events. The other is that the same globalization factors will form the same or similar generational problems or intergenerational conflicts in different countries or regions. It has been noted, for example, that although there has been and is no longer likely to be a unified global youth revolt, as there was in 1968, it does not appear that there is no gap between different generations on a global scale. On the contrary, the generation gap is prevalent in all levels of society (Guidikova, 2007: 284). Since globalization has become the general living background and social factor of the global young generation,

Introduction 17 such a background which differs from the growing-up environment of most of their parents cannot but cause various fractures in society, and the intergenerational fracture is still one of the common forms of social fracture.

Theoretical resources and dialogues Discussing the “generation” of Chinese society and the cultural inheritance between generations is a severe test of our intelligence and endurance. In terms of intelligence, we have to have what Mills called the “sociological imagination”, which is to discover the underlying social motivations behind the specific events that we encounter, and to begin with a series of events to understand their significance to society and our age. In terms of endurance, any observation, collection of empirical data, and interpretation takes time as the significance of the event is not presented to us in a straightforward way. In a sense, it is constructed through our understanding of the respondents and their interaction. To describe, explain, or construct a set of theories related to the subject we are discussing is neither divorced from the empirical facts of sensibility nor from the theoretical guidance of reason. Even if the representative approach of constructivism, “grounded theory”, advocates the establishment of theories based on empirical data (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), it cannot deny that the analysis of empirical data is itself full of theories—as William James said, you need a theory even when you’re picking up stones in the fields (Chen, 2000: 318). In our research, however, the theories we are about to invoke are, in themselves, like the data we derive from the empirical world: merely the basis of our arguments or the theories we advance. What we are talking about here are intergenerational relations and the intergenerational inheritance of a Chinese society in transition in the context of globalization, and our training in the social sciences leads us to analyze our empirical facts primarily from these theoretical perspectives: the theory of generation and intergenerational relations, the theory of social transformation, and the theory of globalization. If we do well, we should be able to have some kind of dialogue not only between theory and experience, but also between theory and theory. Let’s start with the theory of generation and intergenerational relations. We have declared that generation is the fact of biology, but the generation problem and the sociology of youth built around this generation problem are the products of modernity. In his article “Generation in history: Reflections on a controversial concept”, Hans Jaeger argued that discussions of intergenerational relations in the social sciences could be divided into two periods. The first period was 1920–1933, when European scholars, especially the Weimar German sociologist Karl Mannheim, led the way; the second period began after World War II. During this second period, the study of intergenerational relations became the common interest of international scholars, while those in America held the dominant position with their distinctive social science orientation (Jaeger, 1985). In fact, with the transfer of intergenerational research centers from Germany to the United States, there was also a shift in focus and research methods, and the interest in postwar intergenerational research

18 Introduction shifted from a theoretical and historical emphasis to specific empirical research. At that time, according to Alan Spitzer, views of history across generations were no longer considered as compelling as they were decades before (Spitzer, 1973). Realistically, the shift from theory and history to the empirical study of the social sciences began with Mannheim. In “The problem of the generation”, published in 1928, he divided previous generations into two strands: French positivism and German romanticism and historicism. In addition to Comte, French positivism also included Mentre and the Austrian O. Lorenz, whom we mentioned earlier; German romanticism–historicism was represented by Dilthey and Pinder. Although scholars of this period made different contributions to the study of the generations—Comte, for example, discussed the significance of intergenerational succession to social progress; Mentre put forward the idea of studying the generations by means of positivism, including questionnaires; Lorenz tried to study the succession of the generations by analyzing family genealogies; Dilthey even put forward the idea that the same era made the same generation—fundamentally speaking, the purpose of their study of that time was to find a grand law of historical development. In positivism, this law lay at the heart of biological laws of limited life span and intergenerational replacement (Mannheim, 1952: 278); in romanticism–historicism, “imaginary guesswork” replaced real social factors to discover the characteristics of historical progress and certain mysterious rhythms. On the basis of previous studies, Mannheim put forward the assumption of using the “formal sociology” advocated by Simmel to study intergenerational relations. Whereas formal sociology up to now has tended for the most part to study the social existence of man exclusively statically, this particular problem seems to be one of those which have to do with the ascertainment of the origin of social dynamism and of the laws governing the action of the dynamic components of the social process. Accordingly, this is the point where we have to make the transition from the formal static to the formal dynamic and from thence to applied historical sociology—all three together comprising the complete field of sociological research. (Mannheim, 1952: 287–288) To achieve this shift, Mannheim proposed three very important concepts to “designate increasingly intensive relationships between individuals and certain age groups” (Jaeger, 1985: 278). The three interlinked concepts are: generational status, generation as actuality, and the generational unit. “Generational status” is the position of a generation born at the same time in the social structure. Just as social status is determined by the economy and power a person has in the social structure, “generational status” is determined by a person’s particular experience and thought patterns, which in turn depend on the natural fact of intergenerational replacement. However, “generational status” has only an objective existence, and its development to “generation as actuality” requires some kind of additional connection or participation in the

Introduction 19 common destiny of this historical and social unit (Mannheim, 1952: 303), just as only when the “class by itself” has subjective class consciousness, can it become a “class for itself”, or what Mannheim called “conscious class”. Mannheim took the example of the urban and rural youth of his day in Germany. They had the same “generational status”, which only showed that they had the possibility of being involved in some social and historical trend, and it was not until the later Franco-Prussian War affected all social classes in Germany that the sons of peasants and citizens finally became a specific “generation as actuality” through positive interaction. Further, the specific “generation as actuality” can be divided into different “generation units”, because young people who experience the same specific historical problems can be considered to be in the same generation as actuality, and different groups within the same generation as actuality make use of their shared experiences in different ways and thus constitute different generational units. The most striking feature of a definite “generation unit” is its high similarity of consciousness (Mannheim, 1952: 304). To borrow an example from China, the “rebellion” of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 and the subsequent “going to the mountains and countryside” gave birth to a specific “generation as actuality”, among which those 1977-grade students who were sharp-minded enough to seize the opportunity of reform and opening-up eventually formed a distinct “generation unit”. Because of the emphasis on the transformation of formal sociology from static to dynamic, Mannheim naturally placed the study of generation problems in the process of changing social history. The rate of social change directly determines the fertility rate of the actual generation unit. In the social community of farmers, which changes slowly, there is no obvious fracture between the old and the new generations, so that the generation unit is often biological differentiation or affinity caused by age difference. However, in a rapidly changing society, traditional experience and thoughts are difficult to adapt to the changes of society, while new experiences emerge and are easy to be consolidated and become new generation units. However, change is a double-edged sword for both intergenerational consciousness and the generation unit. Rapid changes will also make new experiences and generation consciousness impossible to fix, resulting in the dissolution of new generation units in the bud—either those attached to the old generation or to the new generation. As far as the topic of “cultural reverse” is concerned, the most forward-looking part of Mannheim’s “intergenerational problem” lies in his genius in foreseeing the potential for intergenerational reverse transmission before World War II. With the acceleration of the social dynamic mechanism, not only the problem of the influence of the younger generation on the older generation becomes more and more obvious, though the older is more and more susceptible to the influence of the younger (Mannheim, 1952: 302). Based on such brilliant ideas, Mannheim even found that the forerunners of the older generation, who stood apart from their peers, were often able to provide the next generation with core values and social attitudes (Mannheim, 1952: 308), just as Marx and Engels, born into the bourgeoisie, ultimately provided the ideology for the proletariat.

20 Introduction After discussing Karl Mannheim, we can jump a mere 40 years to discuss Margaret Mead, another American anthropologist who is renowned in the field of intergenerational studies. In a sense, Mead’s research is closest to the theme of our discussion, for her 1970 book Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap was not only a direct product of the 1968 revolution, but also directly related to the possibility of intergenerational communication and dialogue, especially “reversed socialization”. As an anthropologist, Mead is naturally an expert on cultural analysis. In Culture and Commitment, Mead argued that the generational conflicts and confrontations of the 1960s could neither be attributed to social and political differences, nor to biological differences, but to cultural transmission differences in the first place. Starting from the mode of cultural transmission, Mead divided the whole of human culture into three basic types: postfigurative, cofigurative, and prefigurative. “Postfigurative, in which children learn primarily from their forebears, cofigurative, in which both children and adults learn from their peers, and prefigurative, in which adults learn also from their children” (Mead, 1970: 1). Prefigurative culture, the so-called “old age culture”, is the basic characteristic of all traditional societies. From primitive society to feudal society, for thousands or even tens of thousands of years, people lacked the necessary material means for production and social transformation due to their simple means of production and a dangerous natural environment, so the development of the whole society was very slow. In such cultures, the few elders who knew the culture in which they lived best were naturally role models for the younger generation and society as a whole. In the process of cultural transmission in this prefigurative way, the older generation not only conveyed to the younger generation basic survival skills, but also their understanding of life, an accepted lifestyle, and simple concepts of right and wrong, while all the socialization of the younger generation was carried out under the strict control of the older generation, who completely followed the life path of the elders. In this way, of course, they could only be the physical and spiritual continuation of the elders, as well as the products of the land and tradition on which they lived (Mead, 1970: 28). Cofigurative culture is fundamentally a transitional culture, which starts from the collapse of prefigurative culture. Mead listed many historical reasons that led to the collapse of prefigurative culture and the birth of cofigurative culture, such as the failure of a war, migration movement, and the development of science. All these reasons have a common feature, that is, the disruption of a previous culture deprives the younger generation of ready-made role models. Since the predecessors can no longer provide them with a new life mode that meets the requirements of the times, they can only create it based on their own personal experience, follow the forerunners in their age cohorts, and thus produce the cofigurative mode of cultural transmission. Through the description of prefigurative culture and cofigurative culture, Mead naturally turned to the analysis of postfigurative culture. Her postfigurative culture is one of the most important building blocks of her generation gap thinking, and thus is the highlight of Culture and Commitment. Postfigurative

Introduction 21 culture, or “youth culture” as it is called, is a cultural transfer process opposite to prefigurative culture, that is, the transfer of knowledge and culture from the younger generation to their predecessors in the world. The emergence of postfigurative culture is related to the rapid changes of human society after World War II. It is this change that makes the experience of elders inevitably to lose the value of transmission; humans leave the world they know behind and begin to live in a completely strange new era: Today, nowhere in the world are there elders who know what the children know, no matter how remote and simple the societies are in which the children live. In the past there were always some elders who knew more than any children in terms of their experience of having grown up within a cultural system. Today there are none. It is not only that parents are no longer guides, but that there are no guides, whether one seeks them in one’s own country or abroad. There are no elders who know what those who have been reared within the last twenty years know about the world into which they were born. … No generation has ever known, experienced, and incorporated such rapid changes, watched the sources of power, the means of communication, the definition of humanity, the limits of their explorable universe, the certainties of a known and limited world, the fundamental imperatives of life and death—all change before their eyes. (Mead, 1970: 60–61) Mead’s penetrating, insightful words recall the “pioneer” image of the older generation that Mannheim described, as well as the grand argument that the young Fei Xiaotong made 80 years ago after reading Mead’s Keep Your Powder Dry: “Newton spent his life discovering the laws of physics, which today’s college students learn in a week” (Fei, 1985: 85). Indeed, in the face of the upheaval of the development of the times, the old generation dare not abandon the old, and the new generation are afraid of losing the new, which inevitably produces the antagonism and conflict of the two generations, and also makes the older generation fall behind. It was on this basis that Mead dared to declare to the whole of the 20th century: “the characteristics of the modern world are the acceptance of generation breaks and the expectation that each new generation will experience a technologically different world” (Mead, 1970: 47). Based on this belief, not only is dialogue and communication between the two generations necessary, but most importantly, in this dialogue, the older generation should be open-minded to receive the benefits. The experience may be painful, but it is a fact of life: If you do not want to be behind the times, you have to learn from young people, for today they represent the future of humanity. Next up is social transformation theory. Of course, as far as the theory itself is concerned, it is not directly related to the above theory of generation and intergenerational relations. However, because the intergenerational contradictions of Chinese society have been highlighted since the reform and opening-up in 1978 and the extensive social transformation after that, it is necessary for us

22 Introduction to quote and borrow the theory of social transformation here and in other chapters of this book. In the traditional sociology of development, there are two main academic traditions. One is the modernization theory which takes the modernization of developed countries as the research object, and the other is the development theory which takes Latin America, Africa, and East Asia as the research object (Sun, 2005). Although the study of social transformation and development began at least from the French thinkers Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Marie-Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet, and Claude-Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon in the 18th century, it was not until Talcott Parsons and his student Mario Levy that the basic framework of the theory of systematic modernization was complete. On the basis of the traditional–modern dichotomy, modernization theorists put forward the proposition of convergence theory. For example, Huntington claimed that traditional societies had little in common except the lack of modernity, but modernization had triggered the same trend in all societies. In other words, modernization was a process of homogenization.6 Later, the development of Latin America, especially East Asia, inspired theorists to open up new thinking perspectives, and Samir Amin’s “dependency theory” and Immanuel Wallace’s “world system theory” came into being, which constituted the development theory that directly challenged the modernization theory. This theory gave developing countries an impulse to change their marginal or semi-marginal position in the world system by making their own economic leaps. Theory is a reflection of reality. After 1980, dramatic changes or social transformations in China, the former Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe led to the emergence of a third theoretical pole in the sociology of development. Because of the huge differences between these socialist countries and capitalism or other third-world countries, this transformation has unique analytical value. Since the mid-1980s, there has been a significant increase in discussion of China in mainstream American sociological journals (Tu & Yimin, 1999: 2). In 2002 Michael Burawoy, president of the American Sociological Association, acknowledged that such research was becoming mainstream in American society (Sun, 2005). In this case, argued Elizabeth Perry, a political scientist at Harvard University, China studies were likely to grow from a theoretical “consumption domain” to a “production domain” of original analysis (Perry, 1999). Just as China’s reform and opening-up started in the economic field, so did the theory of social transformation. In 1989, Victor Nee, an American scholar, put forward the “market transformation theory”, which later caused wide controversy: The transition from a redistribution economy before reform to a market economy after reform led to the transfer of the power base from redistributive elites to direct producers, and under the joint action of market stimulus and opportunity, the economic return of power capital decreased while that of human capital increased (Nee, 1989). This theory explained the “equalization effect” in the early stage of reform, but it was soon challenged by new realities and theories. Subsequent studies found that political power was not necessarily eroded by the market as predicted by “market transformation theory”; instead,

Introduction 23 a phenomenon similar to “free riding” emerged: that is, political power would receive more economic returns with the development and rise of the market (Li, 2004b; Zhou, 2005). Pure economic theory could not explain the market transformation of Chinese society, so people were forced to seek other explanations. Sun Liping pointed out that the transformation of Chinese society was not only different from nonsocialist countries, but also quite different from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Specifically, this difference or Chinese “characteristic” was manifested in three ways. (1) Although China experienced severe social turbulence in 1989, it did not experience a complete rupture of the political system and ideology, as happened in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s, or the large-scale privatization and market economy transformation that followed. Compared with the “shock therapy” of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, China’s reform or transformation was “gradual”; in other words, it was a transformation without rupture of the basic social system, especially the political system and ideology. (2) In the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, market transformation coincided with regime change, which greatly weakened power capital’s ability to manipulate various types of capital, while in China, since there was no regime replacement, the strong position of political authority was not weakened. Even when the market economy became the dominant economic integration mechanism, political power could still maintain its control and ability to manipulate over other types of capital. (3) Since the original political system and ideology were maintained, throughout the whole process of economic and social transformation, new and old factors naturally collided with each other; that is to say, there would be continuous ideological debates, from whether the market economy was “capitalistic” or “socialistic”, to whether business owners joining the party would change its nature. In order to reduce the ideological cost of reform, the leaders of reform either incorporated market factors into traditional ideology (such as that market economy was also socialism) or explicitly stipulated “no debate”, while the substantive reform measures were carried out in a flexible way (Sun, 2005). Theories like this can not only partially explain the paradox encountered by the market transformation theory, but also enable us to view the transformation of Chinese society in a broader context. Transformation is a very complex process of social change, which starts from the economic field, but gradually permeates into all aspects of social life. In terms of the intergenerational relations we discuss here, the profound impact of social transformation can be clearly found. For example, in terms of the intergenerational differences in income and occupation, in 1984, American scholar William B. White counted each decade from 1930 to 1978 as one generation (the last was eight years) so that there were five generations. His analysis of 2,865 samples from mainland China found that from the first generation of 1930–1939, people’s years of education increased, but their job ranks and incomes declined over time (Parish, 1984). Subsequently, Davis-Friedmann also found that the most prominent feature of the occupational structure of Chinese cities after 1949 was that the older

24 Introduction generation occupied higher positions while the more educated young people occupied lower positions (Davis-Friedmann, 1985). In addition to the influence of Mao Zedong’s claim that “the lowly are the wisest, and the noble are the stupidest”, and of the ideology that intellectuals must accept the re-education of the masses of workers and peasants, the rigidity of bureaucracy itself (newcomers always start at the lowest level), and the state’s direct control over the distribution of jobs and the price of labor, can partly explain William White and Davis-Friedmann’s findings about generational differences before reform. However, after the reform, with the development of a market economy, the economic returns of human capital show diversity in the field of class, but some consistency in the field of generation. For one thing, as mentioned above, enrollment in higher education in China has expanded 17-fold over the past 42 years, which means that the young generation has far greater opportunities for education than their parents and grandparents, and in China’s labor market, education is now the key factor determining layoff, re-employment, and income (MaurerFazio, 1999; Liu, 2006a). That means the young, educated generation now have far more career opportunities than their parents. Another issue is that, according to a survey conducted by the Institute of Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the economic rate of return (ERR) on education in China was only 2.5% in 1981 and 2.7% in 1987 (Li, 2002), but in past decades this figure has increased by more than three to four times: “By the late 1990s, the rate of return on individual education in China’s cities and towns was close to the international average” (Li & Ding, 2003). Although the economic returns on education or human capital are still quite different in different sectors, reflecting that “state power and market forces are often intertwined in different combinations” (Liu, 2006b), intergenerational differences in occupation and income are completely different from what they were in the era of redistribution. The significance of the above discussion for this study lies in the extent to which the new intergenerational differences in economic and occupational status brought about by the transition will affect current intergenerational relations, and further influence the family status of both parents and children and the way of intergenerational inheritance. In 1994, Martin Whyte found in his cooperative study with the Sociology Department of Peking University on generational relationships in Baoding, Hebei Province that not only did the reform and opening-up in 1978 make the younger generation feel that the experience of the older generation was outdated, but the shift from state control to market control of jobs, housing, and other resources also greatly reduced their dependence on the older generation and the state in terms of living arrangements and reduced their respect for the older generation (Whyte, 2003: 14). In fact, it is also possible to discuss regarding the direction of social transformation how much autonomy the younger generation will gain as China’s state–society relationship changes. At what point do the ideological debates that so often confront Chinese society turn into generational spats? And what will the tension be between the centre that the younger generation now occupies in the market economy and the marginality that they

Introduction 25 still occupy in the unaltered social system. (For example, the younger generation of IT professionals are getting their wealth from the market while being marginalized by the existing system.) It was said over 30 years ago that the system exacerbated generational conflicts (Zhang & Cheng, 1988: 5). So has the “cultural reverse” that we discuss here as a micro-mechanism alleviated these conflicts? Finally, let’s turn to globalization theory. Although we have been more or less exposed to this theory, it is still necessary to carry out a simple trace of the theory and its concepts. According to research, in 1960, communication scientist Marshall McLuhan put forward the concept of “Global Village” (McLuhan, 1960) when he edited the book Exploration of Communication. Since then, the word “global” has appeared frequently. In 1961, the word “globe” was included in Webster’s Dictionary, and the following year it appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary. Twenty-two years later, Theodor Levitt, a professor at Harvard Business School, first used the concept of “globalization” in his essay “Market globalization” (Levitt, 1983). Of course, if you look back carefully, ideas have been spreading in different academic contexts since before the concept was proposed. For example, dependency theory discussed the imbalance of global development, especially economic development; Wallenstein put forward a theory of a dynamic world system composed of three levels: center, semiedge, and edge; in the late 1960s, the Club of Rome also discussed the global problems facing mankind, such as population, environment, resources, energy, and food; further back, Marx and Engels started the discussion in the modern sense in German Ideology (1846) and The Communist Manifesto (1848), which formed the real source of modern globalization theory (Wang et al., 2003). In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that the bourgeoisie, by exploiting the world market, made the production and consumption of all nations universal. The old state of local and national self-sufficiency and seclusion had been replaced by the mutual intercourse and interdependence of peoples in all their aspects, which was true not only of material production, but also of spiritual production. The spiritual products of various nations had become public property. The onesidedness and limitation of the nation had become increasingly impossible, so many national and local literatures form a kind of world literature (Marx & Engels, 1972, Vol. 1: 304–305). Although the theory of globalization has been discussed for a long time, the definition of the concept itself is still controversial. It has been suggested that globalization is the process by which the whole world is becoming a single place from the point of view of increasing interconnectedness and interdependence (Mittelmann, 2002: 4). Giddens, for example, wrote that “globalization can thus be defined as the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa” (Giddens, 1990: 64). Fei Xiaotong also believed that globalization was a process of “people all over the world being closely connected” (Fei, 2000). Some other people put forward from the perspective of economic integration that the basis of globalization was the expansion of economic activities across the world, especially the formation of

26 Introduction a world market beyond the boundaries of nation-states. Resources were allocated globally and capital flew globally. Scholars who held this view advocated limiting globalization to the economic field, and opposed the tendency for it to be widely used. Alan Krugman, for example, argued that globalization was nothing more than the movement of multinationals abroad to engage in direct investment across national borders and to create value through commercial networks, calling it the standard definition of economic globalization (Rugman, 2000: 4–5). From the perspective of human civilization and cultural integration, other people asserted that globalization was not a single economic integration process, but was also accompanied by the communication, infiltration, and even conflict between different cultures. Therefore, Featherstone proposed that in the process of globalization, it was possible to have a global culture of continuous interaction and communication (Featherston, 1990). But obviously, in the process of the emergence of this global culture, identity crises caused by the deconstruction or disappearance of local culture were also not uncommon (Fu & Chen, 2003). It is not difficult to understand that some people would also understand globalization as the global expansion of the basic institutions of global capitalism or modernity from the perspective of systems or institutions. On this dimension, Huntington and Fukuyama held the extreme view that globalization was Westernization and further Americanization (Fukujama, 1992; Huntington, 2010). Giddens, as a moderate, believed that globalization was nothing more than the expansion of modernity from Western society to the whole world, because modernity was globalization in its essence (Giddens, 1990: 63). No matter how brief the language we use, we cannot completely describe the increasingly complex globalization theory. What we are concerned with here is how this process of change, known as globalization, affects and impacts the generational and intergenerational relations in social life. For example, we have mentioned earlier that in the context of globalization, intergenerational fracture is still one of the common forms of social fracture. From the perspective of globalization alone, the reason for the intergenerational gap lies in the fact that the arrival of the knowledge society and the competition of the global labor force inevitably make more and more young people stay in school for a longer time, and in order to obtain education and acquire certain knowledge and qualifications necessary for modern society, the younger generation cannot but temporarily leave society and thus become the opposite subgroup of adults. In many countries, including China, young people are even staying in school longer as a temporary measure to cope with unemployment, a reality that has even been a driving force behind the expansion of Chinese universities in recent years. The prolongation of the school period relieves the young generation from taking on various family and social responsibilities too early, but also makes them lose the corresponding power and status in the stratified social system. Of course, globalization is a complex process, and the opportunities and challenges it brings are sometimes different for different countries and regions, as well as for different age cohorts in the same country and region. Take employment as an

Introduction 27 example. On the one hand, globalization in developed countries can cause a rising unemployment rate, falling income, a large gap between the rich and the poor, a sharp decline in social welfare (Zhou, 2007), and young people to become major victims of the global economy, who have to contend with tight social security, low incomes, and mobility between different jobs and regions and countries (Guidikova, 2007: 277). On the other hand, during the boom years of manufacturing and IT in developing countries such as China and India, created by globalization, young people enjoyed relatively more employment opportunities than older generations.7 In a word, there are unnegligible generational differences in both deprivation and acquisition of opportunities, which makes the “generation gap” that was originally thought to be manifested only in values and social behaviors have some practical economic basis. Long before globalization became a hot topic, the idea that social change would lead to generational differences in values, attitudes, and social behavior was already popular, and globalization accelerated the change. In the book Youth and Globalization, sociologists from all over the world found that the values of contemporary young people had been significantly changed, with increased pragmatism, utilitarianism, individualism, and freedom (Lagree, 2007: 11). Consequently, children throughout the world have or will be separated from their parents. As a result of globalization, the spiritual difference between the “great rebellion generation” and their middle-class parents in Europe and America in 1968 (Cheng, 2006) may now be present in different countries and regions, and even between the children and parents of different classes. A series of empirical studies by Ronald Inglehart, a professor at the University of Michigan, confirmed these generational shifts in global values. Since 1970, Inglehart has examined the evolution of people’s values and social behaviors for several decades, starting from the major industrial countries in the West to 43 countries in the world (Inglehart, 1977). Based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (Maslow, 1987: 162–177), he classified physiological needs and safety needs as “materialistic values”, and social needs, respect, and self-actualization needs as “post-materialistic values”. Inglehart made two related assumptions. First, the “scarcity hypothesis”—the public demand or value order related to the degree of rarity or scarcity, that is, rare or scarce items had a higher priority of value. Second, the “socialization hypothesis”—values formed in the early stages of socialization that generally do not change much in adulthood (Inglehart, 1990: 56). This means that materialistic values were the sign of an economically deficient society, while post-materialistic values were the result of an economically prosperous society, and values were gradually developed in the process of human socialization. Based on this concept, Inglehart found through a large sample survey that, unlike the materialistic values of the older generation, young people, who grew up in the boom years with security, improved living conditions, and a good education, were more focused on personal development and inner spiritual pursuits that the older generation. This was true of developed countries in Europe and America, as well as other developing countries (Inglehart, 1997). Although many researchers believed that Inglehart’s study ignored the economic inequality

28 Introduction that the same generation would encounter in the face of the same social reality (Lagree, 2007: 332), the succession of values between generations is indeed a universal reality in the context of globalization. Globalization is still in progress, and it is still full of uncertainty and unpredictability. But relatively speaking, the younger generation can better understand the rules and future of globalization than the older generation, because they participate in the development process of globalization, or globalization itself constitutes the social background in which they grow up. In this sense, the emotional disconnect between parents and children has continued through the generations until Chinese society moved completely to industrial and post-industrial life, and so our research and advocacy of “cultural reverse” also has continuous academic value.

Focus group interviews: a methodological entranceway Although as recently as 30 years ago when I wrote “On the significance of cultural reverse of Chinese youth”, I proposed that the phenomenon of cultural reverse existed widely between the younger and older generations in a rapidly changing society (Zhou, 1988). According to the basic design of this study, my research on the new intergenerational cultural inheritance model of cultural reverse is limited to the parents and children within the family. The basic considerations in making this choice are as follows. First, from the dual perspectives of biology and sociology, within a particular family, the intergenerational boundaries of parents and offspring are very clear, so we can easily compare the differences in values and social behaviors between them; after all, it is not easy to make Mannheim’s “generational unit” or “generation as actuality” operational in sociological research practice. Second, due to the phenomenon of cultural reverse, the traditional Chinese education model has been completely subverted, and the relationship between the constant educators and the educated has been completely reversed. Since I put forward the concept of cultural reverse in 1988, it has been more and more widely used,8 but at the same time, it has also triggered a quite fierce debate. Some early researchers even criticized this concept for denying the role of the older generation of revolutionaries. Although such extreme comments are no longer prominent, it is a painful issue for the older generation to admit that they are inferior to the younger generation, because it obviously challenges or upends the self-identity on which they depend. However, the empirical study I conducted in 1988 (Zhou, 2000a), which included only nine families, showed that older generations were more likely to admit that they were inferior to their sons or grandsons than to other younger people who were not related to them. Fan Jingyi even wrote an article about “going home and asking my grandson” (Fan, 1998). The reason for this difference is quite simple. For one thing, to a considerable extent, children form part of a person’s self-identity. As Fei Xiaotong said, “the cultivation of an ignorant small cell into a clever and lively child is in fact the embodiment of biological force, but in the eyes of parents, it seems to be their own creation”; therefore, “everyone knows that the way to be popular with others is to praise their children” (Fei, 1998: 202). For another

Introduction 29 thing, for the current generation of parents aged 40 to 60, the loss of youth caused by the Cultural Revolution is always a pain in their hearts.9 They also had many ideals in their youth—although in the eyes of today’s children, those may not be ideals at all—but after decades of erosion, the only realistic thing now is to transfer the unfinished ideals to their children in the hope of achieving what psychologists call “substitute satisfaction” through their success. For these reasons, limiting our study to two generations within the family is bound to be twice as effective. After identifying the parent–child relationship within the family and the new interaction phenomenon between parents and children—cultural reverse—as our research object, it is very natural that we choose the now popular qualitative research path to collect and analyze empirical data and put forward our related theories. The debate about qualitative and quantitative has been going on for a long time, and although many methodologists claim, as Dabbs did, that qualitative and quantitative methods are inextricably linked (Dabbs, 1982), in fact the quantitative tradition in social science research is clearly gaining more attention. One reason for this is the general tendency of the public to associate science with numbers and some implicit precision; on the other hand, the social sciences, and sociology in particular, are indeed the result of alignment with the natural sciences which are expressed by quantification in most cases as they have since their birth (Zhou, 2002: 42). However, the fact that qualitative and quantitative methods are still widely used by different people and constantly arouse people’s interest at the same time indicates that they represent two basic possible ways of human understanding or analyzing problems respectively (Chen, 2000: 10–11). Dabbs once analyzed the difference between qualitative and quantitative research methods, that is, the qualitative concept directly relates to the nature of things, while the quantitative concept relates to the quantity of something. Quantitative research explores the calculation and measurement of things, while qualitative research involves the what, how, when, and where something happens or appears, so it is more concerned with the meaning, concept, definition, feature, metaphor, symbol, and interpretation of things (Dabbs, 1982: 32). Apparently, the significance of qualitative research is that some human experiences cannot be fully expressed through quantitative means, while qualitative research methods can trigger memories of social sights, sounds, and smells that are obscured by our daily lives (Berg, 2001: 3). Social science research cannot be separated from methods, but it is not a pure arena of methods. The reason why we choose to use a certain method is not only because of theoretical orientation and training, but also because of the applicability of this method to our research topic. In the present study, we choose qualitative methodology because the phenomenon of cultural reverse is a new one in Chinese society following the reform and opening-up of 1978, which is contrary to people’s daily experience and understanding of intergenerational inheritance, so there may be situations that parents are unaware of or unwilling to admit the presence of due to the parent–child relationship. Therefore, qualitative analysis of this social phenomenon may be more appropriate than quantitative research based on large-scale questionnaire survey. In addition, for this new and special phenomenon in a period

30 Introduction of rapid social changes, qualitative research can not only provide us with a new perspective, but also facilitate us so as to understand the personal views of the parties, and construct the subjective significance of this phenomenon concerning the interaction of the parties. Of course, even qualitative research is not a single research method. As Van Maanen said, qualitative research was like a big umbrella (Van Maanen et al., 1982), and various methods constitute its ribs. Berg also said: Some authors associate qualitative research with the single technique of participant observation. Other writers extend their understanding of qualitative research to include interviewing as well. However, popular qualitative research additionally includes such methods as observation of experimental natural settings, photographic techniques (including videotaping), historical analysis (historiography), document and textual analysis, sociometry, sociodrama and similar ethnomethodological experimentation, ethnographic research, and a number of unobtrusive techniques. (Berg, 2001: 3) Back to our research theme, apart from the historical and textual methods that we use as an auxiliary rather than primary means to study current events, pure observation and those video and social performance techniques based on observation can reflect some aspects of parent–child interaction, but the phenomenon of cultural reverse is not a habit in daily life after all—it does not appear as regularly in family interactions as dressing and eating—so observation alone will not enable us to obtain sufficient and meaningful empirical information. Obviously, if we want to understand the real situation of cultural reverse, we must rely on the description of the real interaction between the actors, that is the parents and children themselves. This kind of description can not only make the phenomenon of cultural reverse emerge from the details of daily life, but also make these intermittent events obtain some narrative continuity through the subjective construction of the parties. Therefore, compared with other qualitative research methods, it is possible to obtain indepth and rich perceptual data on the phenomenon of cultural reverse in a family where parent–child interaction is frequent. Based on the same considerations, we adopted the popular focus group interview or typical group interview as the main means to collect data (Merton & Kendall, 1946; Stewart & Shamdasani, 1990; Morgan, 1996). To be specific, the interviews were conducted by grouping the families with distinctive characteristics in parent–child interaction, so as to obtain the specific details and modes of daily interactions among family members. Here, the focus group interview is a research technique to collect data through group interactive discussion on topics determined by researchers (Morgan, 1996), which we can understand according to the following five aspects. First, this is a research method for data collection; second, it uses discussion of interactions within a group as a source of information; third, it is asserted that researchers should play an active guiding role in the discussion for the purpose of collecting data; fourth, perhaps

Introduction 31 most importantly, the whole meaning of the concept of “focus” in focus group interviews is that interviews should be limited to certain questions (Stewart & Shamdasani, 1990: 10), and finally, the size of the group assembled is limited to four so that it is not too large that each member can engage in a full discussion (Smith, 1954: 39). The group interview technique used in focus group interviews was first formulated by American social psychologist Emory S. Bogardus (1926), and later benefited from oral historians who advocated “listening” to the “living history” of the people at the bottom (Chen, 2000: 211). But as a complete concept and research method it was credited to sociologist Robert Merton. On the evening of November 23, 1941, Merton, who had just arrived at Columbia University to teach in the sociology department, was invited by his colleague Paul Lazarsfeld to comment on a World War II program on NBC in New York after dinner. This event not only started their subsequent 35-year collaboration,10 but also led Merton to first use the concept of focus group interviews in the program analysis process.11 Forty-five years later, Merton told a meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) about the historical significance of the event for focus group interviews: Thus it was that Paul dragged me into the strange world of radio research. … I enter a radio studio for the first time, and there I see a smallish group—a dozen, or were there twenty?—seated in two or three rows. Paul and I take our places as observers at the side of the room as unobtrusively as we can; there is no one-way mirror or anything of that sort. These people are being asked to press a red button on their chairs when anything they hear on the recorded radio program evokes a negative response—irritation, anger, disbelief, boredom—and to press a green button when they have a positive response. … Thereafter, we observe one of Paul’s assistants questioning the test-group—the audience—about their “reasons” for their recorded likes and dislikes. (Merton, 1987: 552–553) Then, at the kind invitation of Lazarsfeld, Merton put forward his own opinions on the research and interview procedures and began to conduct interviews by himself. As Merton put it, this led to his life-long engagement with the focus group interview (Merton, 1987: 553). Indeed, it was not long after this that Merton applied the method to the study of American forces led by Samuel Stouffer during World War II. To be specific, this method was used to study the effect of morale-boosting films in military barracks. In 1943, he studied the influence of bond-related broadcasts on the audience through the method of the focused personal interview (Merton & Kendall, 1946). However, the focus group interview over the following 40 years of history received recognition only from outsiders. After Merton’s pioneering work, this method started to be widely used in project evaluation, marketing, public policy, advertising, and communication research (Stewart & Shamdasani, 1990: 10), but it was more or less forgotten in standard sociological studies. The

32 Introduction “renaissance” of this approach in sociological research began in the mid-1980s. In 1987, Merton published the essay “The focused interview and focus group: Continuities and discontinuities”, based on the lecture I mentioned earlier, comparing his work in the 1940s with focus group research in the field of market research (Merton, 1987). Meanwhile, John Knodel et al. also published a book summarizing the focus group interview method they used in the study of population change in Thailand (Knodel et al., 1987). Since then, interest in this approach has grown rapidly in the social sciences, with Morgan counting more than 100 empirical studies using focus group interviews published in various Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) journals in 1994 alone, and it has gained particular attention in the fields of aging, AIDS, and feminism. In particular, Morgan pointed out that one of the key themes that recurred in many areas of research that used focus groups was the empowerment of marginalized groups to “speak” (Morgan, 1996: 133). Coincidentally, in this study, the reason why I used focus group interviews to collect data on parent–child interaction and cultural reverse within the family is to listen to the experience and voice of both parents and children, especially children in a relatively weak position in the family, through the unique advantages of this qualitative research method. Clearly, the benefits of using focus group interviews lie in the following. (1) Heated group discussions with multiple participants can provide a useful stimulus to the participants, thus generating ideas and interaction details that may be overlooked or unexpected during individual interviews. In this regard, focus group interviews are similar to the “brainstorming” methods prevalent in advertising or creative fields (Stewart & Shamdasani, 1990: 26). This psychological stimulation of focus group members caused by intra-group interaction is called the “Group Effect” (Carey, 1994). My research also proves that after mutual stimulation and inspiration, the phenomenon of cultural reverse discussed by the parents and children does eventually provide abundant detail, which was beyond the expectations of researchers and interviewees. (2) Focus groups composed of different families can effectively change or greatly reduce the inequality between parents and children. From the perspective of parents, group discussion with multiple participants can effectively suppress the excessive seriousness of parents due to considerations of self-dignity, which obviously is not conducive to the smooth communication between the two generations; from the perspective of the children, we all know that children are expressive, so discussions involving multiple people can inspire and encourage them to be more “aggressive”. The study found that in order to show their “democracy” or their children’s “ability”, many parents did not stop their children’s “transgressions” in interviews, and even encouraged them. (3) The study of parent–child cultural reverse through the focus group interview helps researchers and subjects to exchange views on this phenomenon, to strengthen understanding, and jointly to construct new knowledge related to it. One principle often cited by focus group users is that individual knowledge emerges from a complex network of personal interactions with others. In this network interaction, participants’ perspectives will be expanded through collective

Introduction 33 efforts, and they will be exposed to more specific areas of knowledge, to a deeper broader cognitive model, emotional communication, and value judgment, so as to establish some kind of connection between personal past experience and reality (Morgan, 1988; Chen, 2000: 216). In this regard, my research also confirms that interactions in focus groups do contribute to participants’ understanding and identification of new things. Not only can the parent–child experience of others or other families help individuals to confirm the reality and universality of cultural reverse, but this communication also contributes to the understanding and meaning construction of this phenomenon between parents and children. When discussing focus group interviews, Stewart and Shamdasani pointed out that a focus group is not just a haphazard discussion or brainstorming session among people who happen to be available; it is a well-planned research endeavor that requires the same care and attention that is associated with any other type of scientific research. (Stewart & Shamdasani, 1990: 57) To make a focus group study successful, there are generally two very critical steps: interview orientation design and the recruitment of participants. The first step is to establish a group discussion process, or to find ways to refine or express the problem. What issues will be addressed or discussed? What data are collected? What is the purpose? In my research, the issues to be discussed and the relevant data to be collected mainly involve four aspects. First, in our social life, has there been a change in the intergenerational transmission between parents and children, or, as we say, the phenomenon of cultural reverse? Second, if there is a phenomenon of cultural reverse, then in what aspects is it expressed in social life? Third, where does the ability of children to educate their parents come from? In other words, how does this “subversion” of intergenerational relations occur? Finally, how do parents and children view the phenomenon of cultural reverse? And to what extent will this phenomenon affect the intergenerational relationship between parents and children and change their status and adaptation in family and social life? The purpose of this research is also very clear. We hope that people of different generations can gain a full understanding of the significance of cultural reverse and find a responsible and rational solution to the increasingly fierce intergenerational opposition and conflict. As far as step two is concerned, who and how many people are we looking at? In terms of the number of focus groups, it is generally agreed that in order to conduct discussions effectively and collect sufficient data, there should be three to six focus groups, and the appropriate number of people for each group should be six to twelve (Stewart & Shamdasani, 1990: 57–58; Lengua et al., 1992: 163; Morgan, 1996; Rogers, 1994: 292). Of course, both the number of focus groups and the number of people in each group depend on the novelty, complexity, homogeneity, and heterogeneity of the participants. For example, Kitzinger (1994) interviewed 52 focus groups to study how different groups felt

34 Introduction about AIDS. Gamson organized 37 focus groups to get people’s views on four different political issues (Gamson, 1992). As another example, some people think that the number of focus groups should not be too large for the discussion of complex issues, but five to seven people should be the most appropriate (Berg, 2001: 116). In our study, considering the novelty and shock of the phenomenon of cultural reverse, we spent several years interviewing 34 focus groups, including 77 families of different types, in the five major cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, and Guangzhou. All focus groups were made up of two to four families, with a base size of six to twelve people, though it turned out that two families, or about six people, were the best. On rare occasions, while waiting with one family for another, we tried to interview members of that family first, but often encountered what people call “dullness” problems (Stewart & Shamdasani, 1990: 57). So the change from one family to two is not just a quantitative increase, it is a qualitative change. In other words, the interaction of more than two families produces a sort of emergent quality that favors mutual stimulation. The selection of the 77 households was naturally based on the non-probability sampling or targeted sampling principle commonly used in qualitative research (Chen, 2000: 103). In fact, the limitation of inferences on the results of focus group interviews itself brings convenience to the sampling. We did use a variety of sampling methods in our research, such as snowball or chain sampling, chance sampling, targeted random sampling, and convenience sampling, as well as considering homogeneity and typical issues. Referring to the recruitment of focus group members, Stewart and Shamdasani suggested that “if the research question related to the response of specific types of individuals (e.g., men, children, and physicians), the composition of the group must reflect that type of individual” (Stewart & Shamdasani, 1990: 53). This was just the principle we followed in choosing our samples. So we did not choose double income, no kids (DINK) families or “empty nest” families where there is no intergenerational relationship; nor did we choose a family with children below school age, because, obviously, even if there was cultural reverse in such a family, it would not go beyond the food selection range mentioned by Guo Yuhua. For these 77 study samples, I rarely considered their representativeness or inferential significance on a larger scale (although I believe that not only in the family, even in the whole society outside the family, cultural reverse is now a universal form of intergenerational transmission), but I was very concerned about whether they could reflect and explain this completely new social phenomenon of cultural reverse relatively accurately. In this respect, it is no wonder that Bourdieu and Wacquant are often quoted as saying: Everything becomes different, and much more difficult if, instead of taking the notion of “profession” at face value, I take seriously the work of aggregation and symbolic imposition that was necessary to produce it, and if I treat it as a field, that is, as a structured space of social forces and struggles. How do you draw a sample in a field? If, following the

Introduction 35 canon dictated by orthodox methodology, you take a random sample, you mutilate the very object you have set out to construct. If, in a study of the juridical field, for instance, you do not draw the chief justice of the Supreme Court, or if, in an inquiry into the French intellectual field of the 1950s, you leave out Jean-Paul Sartre, or Princeton University in a study of American academia, your field is destroyed, insofar as these personas or institutions alone mark a crucial position. There are positions in a field that admit only one occupant but command the whole structure. (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992: 243) Interview data from 34 focus groups of 77 families constituted the main empirical basis of this study. In addition to the four focus group interviews of nine families completed in 1998, the interviews of other families were completed in 2004. We still retained the interview data of the four focus groups completed in the 1990s, not only because some of the families had close interactions with me, but also because the parent–child interaction in these families also stimulated my initial sociological imagination, including the family of Professor Z, who in 1998 revived my interest in the subject, and whose son is now overseas pursuing a doctorate in biology at a prestigious university in the United States. The 34 focus groups were interviewed in different locations, either at the researcher’s own home, at the interviewee’s home, or in a hotel, school research room, or tea house. Each focus group was interviewed for two to four hours. In order to experience the atmosphere of the scene and observe the details of the parent–child interaction, all focus group interviews were basically conducted by the researcher himself, with several graduate students employed as research assistants, responsible for recording and organizing 34 interviews. In this study, B, S, C, N, and G are used to represent Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Nanjing, and Guangzhou respectively for the convenience and clarity of narration and the principle of anonymity of the social sciences. Then, 26 English letters (A, B, C, D, etc.) are used to represent different families in different cities. In each family, the father is F (father), the mother is M (mother), the son is B (boy), the daughter is G (girl), and the child’s teacher is T (teacher). For example, the code name of Professor Z, whom I mentioned several times before—the father of A family in Nanjing—is NAF. In addition, in order to further understand the significance of cultural reverse, we also conducted family interviews with nine sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, communication scientists, and educationalists in five major cities. Given that the experts are discussing academic opinions, which do not involve personal information or family privacy, we quote and label them directly. Finally, it is important to note that while there are many people involved in this book, as readers, you do not have to look for individuals or families that you might be familiar with, because everything described here is happening around us, in your family or mine, in every corner of a rapidly changing society.

36 Introduction

Notes 1 It is said in Chinese tradition that the lamb always kneels down to suckle, in order to thank the ewe for feeding, and adult crows are also born to carry food back to the nest to feed their older parents, who are unable to fly far to find food, so the Chinese use the words “the lamb kneels to drink milk” and “the crow feeds back” to indicate the righteousness of the son of man to feed his relatives. It first appeared in the Jin Dynasty’s “Buwu poem”, where it is written that “the hungry crows are fed by their children”; further, Li Shizhen simply called the crow the mercy bird: “When the bird is born, its mother feeds it for 60 days, and when it grows up, it will feed its mother for 60 days, which can be said to be very filial” (Compendium of Materia Medica: Poultry). While all of this is wrong from a modern biological point of view, the term “reverse” is a metaphor for the reversed socialization of the younger generation to the older generation. 2 Interestingly, Professor Manabu Sato, an educator at the University of Tokyo, calls the teaching changes taking place in Japanese classrooms “quiet revolutions” and argues that the revolution is different from the unified education revolution under the control of the central government. It is a revolution rooted in lower-class democracy, based on schools and communities. It is a revolution that supports the diversified personality of every student and promotes the autonomy and creativity of teachers (Sato, 2003). This idea soon had a significant impact on the educational sociologists in China (Guo, 2003). 3 In Durkheim’s view, the so-called “social facts” are phenomena that occur at the collective level of society. It consists of ways of acting, ways of thinking, and ways of feeling that are external to the individual but have the coercive power to control the individual (Durkheim, 1966: 3). Being external, coercive, and universal are the three basic characteristics of social facts, and we can only interpret social facts according to social facts. 4 On this issue, there is a view that comes from the world system that modernity is global because European modernity is not an independent, autonomous, and selfreferential system, but a part of the world system itself. Specifically, Europe’s centrality to the world system is not due to any inherent advantages it accumulated against other cultures in the Middle Ages, but rather is an important result of the simple fact of the discovery, conquest, colonization, and integration of America. This simple fact gives Europe a decisive comparative advantage over the OttomanMuslim world, India, and China. Modernity is the product of these events, not their cause (Jameson & Miyishi, 2000: 4–5). 5 From the perspective of world system theory, Wallenstein proposed that the 1968 movement was an expression of anger against the old world system, which was then suppressed under the support of that old world system (Wallerstein et al., 2002). 6 In fact, for most early Western scholars, especially those who hold the theory of linear evolution, the development of society is a process of constant convergence. Marx said that what the more industrialized countries show to the less industrialized countries is only the future image of the latter (Marx & Engels, 1972, Vol. 23: 8). Parsons also stated that modern society emerged in a separate stock market, essentially European and Western, the heirs of the northern Mediterranean and the western half of Rome. The foundation was then laid by Western Christian societies, from which we derived the so-called “modern social system” (Parsons, 1971: 1). 7 We hope that our discussion here will not lead to the misconception that only the third world or developing countries are beneficiaries of globalization. In fact, it has been noted that developing countries, including China, have seen rapid growth in low-tech manufacturing in recent decades as a result of globalization, so as to make it possible to offer positions and material benefits to more people. However, such rapid economic growth also makes them pay the price of excessive consumption of

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8

9 10

11

energy, ecological destruction, a wealth gap, and the disintegration of the original social structure. In addition, while promoting the economic growth of third-world countries, globalization also causes deprivation in these countries to a great extent and forms a bigger gap between them and developed countries (UNDP, 1996: 2–3). However, Western capitalist countries and their interest groups benefit from globalization at the same time with the marginalization and poverty of some classes or groups in their social structure. It turns out that it is these groups, including youth, that form the main camp of anti-globalization, especially “street protests” (Han, 2003; Lagree, 2007: 168). A special article was written on the research status of cultural reverse and reversed socialization, which confirms that “in 1988, Mr. Zhou Xiaohong published the foundational work of domestic research on ‘reversed socialization’ and ‘cultural reverse feeding’”. See “On the significance of reverse feeding of contemporary Chinese youth culture”, in which I put forward the concept of “cultural reverse” (Gong & Jing, 2004). In this paper, the authors make a careful analysis and comment on the 31 papers about cultural reverse. In this sense, the “youth with no regret”, which they repeatedly declare today, voices a last little bit of self-esteem or self-identity, though it actually contains much bitterness. It is said that in order to elevate Columbia’s sociology department to the top level in the country, the great theoretician Merton and the great methodologist Lazarsfeld did not continue the original confrontation their theoretical and methodological colleagues had hoped them to do by introducing them separately into the department. Rather, they started a real partnership: Merton estimated that during the 35 years they worked together, apart from five years, they discussed for an average of three hours a working day over the 40 weeks of each school year: a total of 18,000 hours (Rogers, 1994: 256–257). Interestingly, the initial prototype of this concept was “focussed Group Interview”, which later became “Focused Group Interview” (Merton, 1987) at the insistence of the editors. Later, it was further simplified to “Focus Group” in the daily use of market researchers.

2

Intergenerational relations and their transitions A historical review

Anyone whose thoughts are not particularly conservative or closed likes his children to be stronger, healthier, wiser, nobler—happier—than oneself, that is, beyond himself, and beyond the past. Transcendence requires change, so the descendants should change the things of the ancestors. “Three years without changing the way of the father is filial piety”, of course, is a distortion, and the root-cause for degenerated children. If the ancient single-celled animals had followed this lesson, they would never have dared to divide and multiply, and there would be no more human beings in the world. Lu Xun

Earthbound china and its generational hierarchy Historically, Chinese values and social behaviors have been influenced by traditional Chinese culture, which takes Confucianism as its main corpus, which also influences the parent–child relationship within the family. The omnipresence and omnipotence of this influence is fully demonstrated in a frequently quoted play. During the Tang dynasty, Grand General Xue Rengui’s wife was pregnant and expectant when he was on a military expedition to the Western Regions. Eighteen years later, on his way back home, General Xue encountered a group of younger soldiers contesting for eagle shooting. One of the soldiers, the handsome archery superior, made Xue jealous, so he proposed a competition between them. As a result, Xue, who was not good at archery, fired an arrow at the young man from embarrassment and anger. He did not know that it was his son whom he had never seen. In this story, the young archer was shot because he had violated two precepts of traditional Chinese culture. First, he did not recognize his father; a child should honor his parents, and even if he did not know his father, he should learn to respect his elders. Second, he was guilty of disobedience; by openly challenging his father or the general of the court, he had broken the moral order of society. If popular folklore often reflects the essence of a culture, the story of Xue Rengui’s killing of his son hints at the emphasis Chinese culture places on social order. Accordingly, the story of Oedipus killing his father in ancient DOI:10.4324/9780429447679-2

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Greece embodies Western culture’s desire for personal freedom (Bond, 1990: 186). Traditional Chinese culture, represented by Confucianism, dominates the social order of China and, of course, the basic system of the family as the cell of society. In Lin Yutang’s words: The first lesson this system teaches our children is the social responsibility between people, the need for mutual adjustment, self-control, humility, a clear sense of obligation, gratitude to parents and humility to teachers. This system almost replaces the status of religion, giving people a sense of social survival and family continuity, thus satisfying people’s eternal desire. … This family system fosters a sense of calm in our minds from an early age, and keeps young people on the straight and narrow. It provides excessive protection for our children. Curiously, very few children rebelled and fled. In a parent-centered authoritarian family, this system makes young people lose their ambition, courage and originality. (Lin, 2000: 181–182) The basis of Chinese traditional culture is the self-sufficient agricultural civilization which has lasted for thousands of years. It is suitable for the small-scale peasant economy of consanguinity or the patriarchal clan. The formation of such an economy is related to the closed nature of self-supporting, male farming and female weaving. In a rural society dominated by this economy, kinship and geography are the two most important social relations, and in traditional China the former often plays an incomparable decisive role in these two relations. In this respect, Fei Xiaotong’s exposition is representative. In Rural China, he writes: Blood is a stable force. In a stable society, geography is no more than the projection of consanguinity. “Born here, died there” fixed the relationship between man and earth. Life, that is, blood, determines his land. The intergenerational reproduction of the population, like a sapling growing from a root, is geographically close to one another. Geographical proximity can be said to be a reflection of kinship, and location is a socialized space. (Fei, 1998: 70) Blood comes naturally. Its natural and non-selective nature means everyone is exposed to some kind of consanguinity network from the day of their birth. But we are only talking about the biological side of blood; on the social side, how a society treats its blood relationships is restricted and influenced by various factors of that society. In traditional China, the blood relationship can become a major social bond, which is indeed related to the dependence of a farming society on the land and single “farming” behavior. The dependence on the land makes people form the habit of living together, because the economic activity of farming needs to rely on the group composed of father and son, that is, the family, which is a small and lasting and stable group, as the basic unit of production. All this naturally further forms the emphasis on the household, family, and clan based on blood relationship (Zhou, 1998a: 47).

40 Intergenerational relations After entering a feudal society from a clan society, based on a hierarchical system and blood ties, Chinese society formed the patriarchal clan system that lasted for thousands of years, which is a reflection of the family system within the national system, hence creating the “imperial family” ruling system. Take the three dynasties of Xia, Shang, and Zhou, which lasted for more than 1,800 years, for example. As the supreme rulers of the time, King Xia, King Shang, and King Zhou were able to become the political masters of the world simply because they were foremost among the chiefs. In other words, their status as the supreme ruler of the country comes down to their patriarchal status in their ruling clan (Liu, 2005). From such a point of view, monarchical power originates from patriarchy, which is the natural result of its introduction into the political field through patriarchal ethics. Accordingly, the internal organizational structure of the three dynasties of Xia, Shang, and Zhou is also based on the clan or family. Countless clans were politically subordinated by virtue of their blood relationship with the royal family; the original state was organized by several consanguineous groups. In each such group, domination is also closely related to paternity; or, the “consanguineous longitudinal axis” formed by the father-and-son relationship in the family becomes the basic principle of the social structure (Lin, 2006). Because of the natural connection between domination and patriarchy, the elders of course became the rulers of the group, or rather, age became an important condition to determine the rulers of the group from the very beginning. One reason why age is an important condition to determine the identity of rulers is biological. As a biological fact, the succession of generations determines the innate inequality of the relationship between father and son. The other reason is a social one. This inherently unequal relationship between father and son, due to the social power of the parents, the relatively extensive economic and social resources, and the obvious advantages of knowledge and experience in the ancient societies that were only changing very slowly, places the children who stumble into this world at an inherent disadvantage. Furthermore, since the patriarchal system highlights the age factor, the concept of respecting elders is naturally emphasized in the feudal political system, not only at the national level, but also in the daily life of ordinary people. According to Mead, the number of elderly people is small, but they are the most culturally experienced; and the accepted way of life is reflected in the way they sound and act. As such, they have become role models for the younger generation. Their keen eyes, robust limbs, and tireless diligence have sustained life and culture. If such a culture is to survive, it cannot do without an older generation, because they were not only able to guide their fellow humans through times of famine, but they themselves provide a complete model of life (Mead, 1970: 28). Thus, in The Book of Rites: Kings: “The fifty-year-old can use crutches at home, the sixty-year-old in the town, the seventy-year-old in the country, and the eighty-year-old in the palace; as for the ninety-year-old, even the emperor must be present at his home to talk to him” (Chen, 1987: 66). Since social status increases with the increase of age, it is inevitable that the corresponding endowment ceremony arose:

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The fifty-year-old is raised in the village under the jurisdiction of the scholarofficials, the sixty-year-old is raised in the country under the jurisdiction of the vassal states, and the seventy-year-old is sent to the school under the jurisdiction of the emperor; this system reaches all the vassal states. (Chen, 1987: 66) This custom was followed from generation to generation until the Han dynasty, when the so-called system of “Sanlao and Wugeng” was formed, stipulating that the emperor should “raise old and senior officials with profound knowledge by the courtesy of his father and brother, so as to demonstrate filial piety to the people of the world” (Fan, 1978: 103). In the Qin dynasty, as a result of the establishment of a unified system of highly centralized imperial power, the patriarchal clan system was dealt a fatal blow; but since the subsequent generations of rulers realized the importance of the patriarchal system in maintaining feudal rule, this system and the corresponding concept of respecting the old eventually became an institutional culture throughout feudal society in China through a series of norms and rituals. In the formation or maintenance of the patriarchal clan system, Confucius and Confucianism played a leading role. In order to give rationality to the feudal patriarchal system and respecting the aged, he began with the concept of filial piety, formed from the concept of ancestor worship in the later period of the clan society, systematically sorted out the Chinese cultural classics, and laid the developmental direction of Confucian culture (Zheng, 2007). In this respect, Confucianism has two characteristics. First, based on filial ethics, filial piety, which deals with the blood relationship between parents and children, is extended from the etiquette rules that meet the needs of the patriarchal clan system to the necessary code of conduct for everyone in daily life, transforming from an external code of conduct to a person’s emotional needs from the heart. According to Confucius, filial piety comes entirely from inner “peace” and not from external compulsion. Filial piety is, in fact, the subjective reflection of human objective kinship relations. The upper part of the character 孝 (filial piety) is taken from 老 (the living elderly) or 考 (the dead parents); the lower part of the character 孝 is 子 (children and grandchildren), which means if there is no son to rely on, there will be no one to support them when they are old and no one to mourn for them after they die. Thus, “being kind to parents is filial piety” (Erya: On Closeness). Further, Confucius said, “Benevolence (仁 ren) is just man (人 ren), and it is important to love parents” (Zhu, 1987: 40). That is to say, the scope of benevolence is limited to human beings, and is not universal love. “It is important to love parents” means that although the scope of benevolence concerns the whole human race, the most important thing is loving parents, that is, a person must first love his parents and other blood relations, then extend his love to others, to all other people in the world. This kind of water-ripple -effect expansion of the moral order is what Fei Xiaotong later referred to as the “differential order pattern” (Fei, 1998: 27–29). Second, we can already see from “loving parents and being kind to people” that the Confucian culture tries to associate filial piety with political conduct. Filial piety is not only a personal virtue, but also a social and political one. Of

42 Intergenerational relations course, as early as the Western Zhou dynasty, filial piety and government were inseparably connected. For example, King Cheng of Zhou said to his subordinate Jun Chen: “Jun Chen, because you are filial to parents and good to brothers, you are qualified for leadership” (Zhoushu: Jun Chen).1 However, Confucius theoretically constructed the consanguinity clan relationship and the feudal hierarchy system through the two words “filial piety”, so that patriarchy took root in the political field through the relationship with patriarchal ethics, so that, after the Han dynasty, loyalty and filial piety coexist, and “filial piety governs the world”. The relationship between filial piety and the patriarchal family system and feudal hierarchy has been proved by modern psychology. It is found that filial piety is not only significantly correlated with familial values (Zhuang & Yang, 1989), but also with parenting style: people who scored high on the filial piety scale also had stronger authority traits (Ho & Kang, 1984). This shows that filial piety not only reflects the traditional patriarchal family system to some extent, but also takes the relationship of attachment or obedience as its psychological basis. After thousands of years of transmission and evolution, the content of filial piety has become more and more extensive, from the rule of the parent–child relationship to the principle of interpersonal relationships, and then to social and political virtues. In 1989, Yang Guoshu used the method of content analysis to study the words and examples related to filial piety recorded in The Book of Rites, The Four Books, The Classic of Filial Piety, and various famous family sayings, and found that there were as many as 15 traditional filial piety rules with parents as the object: Respect parents, obey parents (no violation), admonish parents with reasons, serve parents with courtesy, inherit family ambition and property, highlight parents’ reputation, miss parents, entertain parents, save parents from worry, stay with parents, support parents, take good care of oneself, leave an heir for parents, bury parents with ceremony, and sacrifice parents with ritual (Yang, 1989). In fact, combining the above 15 rules, there are only three basic ethical connotations of filial piety concerning the parent–child relationship, which is what Mencius proposed: Serve, honor, and obey your parents. According to Mencius, “What takes priority? Duties to parents do” (Zhu, 1987: 408); he also said, “The highest level of filial piety is reverence of parents” (Zhu, 1987: 439). And the third aspect of filial piety, which transcends duties and reverence, is obedience, on which Mencius stressed, “A child not getting along with his parents is no human; one not obedient to his parents is no son” (Zhu, 1987: 395). Here, “obedience” wants to emphasize that filial piety is not an emotional exchange relationship between parents and children, but unconditional compliance with the parents’ will. “Be obedient to parents even if they don’t love me” (Zhu, 1987: 440). Because of this, we can also understand “filial piety” simply as “no violation”. Objectively speaking, as the initiator of the “ethical codes” when he stressed that “the king abides by the duties of being a monarch, his officials abide by the duties of being a minister; the father abides by the duties of being a father, and his children abide by the duties of being children” (The Analects of Confucius: Yanjuan), Confucius’s original intention is just to ensure that kings, officials,

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fathers, and sons can follow their own norms and duties dictated by the feudal hierarchical system. In addition, Confucius’s demands on both sides are mutual; that is, “the emperor treats his subjects with courtesy, and the subjects treat their lord with loyalty” (The Analects of Confucius: Bayi). According to Confucius, filial piety is just a kind of natural love; when parents misconduct themselves, “it is the son’s duty to remonstrate” (The Analects of Confucius: Liren), which further shows that if the parents are wrong, the son can gently admonish the parents. Confucius’s follower, Mencius, who was honored as San (the Second Sage), adopted his view, insisting on mutual respect and equality in the emperor–subject relationship and a “loving father and obedient son” in the parent–child relationship. Mencius stipulated that the Confucian interpersonal relationship is: The father and the son are affectionate toward each other, the emperor and his subjects are loyal toward each other, the husband and the wife are dutiful toward each other, the elderly and the young should follow the order of seniority, and friends are faithful toward each other. (Mencius: Teng Wengong) We believe that, although Confucius and Mencius did not advocate the unequal relationship between monarch and minister or between father and son, the filial piety requirements of “obedience and kinship” or “no disobedience” laid the foundation for the later implementation of the “three cardinal principles and five constants” as the core of the doctrine of Confucianism in the Song and Ming dynasties. The three cardinal principles and five constants were initiated in the Han dynasty. In Baihu Tongyi, Dong Zhongshu first deduced that Confucius’s “the king abides by the duties of being a monarch, his officials abide by the duties of being a minister; the father abides by the duties of being a father, and his children abide by the duties of being children” as meaning “those who are vassals should be absolutely obedient to the sovereign, those who are sons should be absolutely obedient to their father, and those who are wives should be absolutely obedient to their husband” (the three cardinal principles). He then asserted that “benevolence, justice, propriety, wisdom, and faith” (the five constants) be a permanent guide for maintaining and adjusting the three cardinal principles. Later, the scholars of the Song and Ming dynasties regarded the three cardinal principles and five constants as the eternal principle of nature, which further strengthened the autocratic rule of feudal imperial power from the perspective of ideology. After that, in governing the family and the country, the people obey the king, the son obeys the father, and the wife obeys the husband. Confucian preaching did form the norms of family behavior, namely, women’s morality and filial piety (Rozman, 2003: 167). The concept of filial piety or “no violation” has laid the most basic behavior pattern for the traditional parent–child relationship in China. Among the people, “the widely spread ‘twenty-four filial piety’ is a teaching material to popularize this model through examples” (Fei, 1998). This code of conduct endows parents in rural society with the right to educate their children, which forms the basis of their daily authority. It forces the young generation to accept it gradually in

44 Intergenerational relations daily life through the indoctrination of etiquette and custom. In terms of the content of rites and customs, it may be related to family hierarchy, norms, sacrifice, structure, and power, or to local history, belief, folk customs, production, and even climate. Rituals and customs involve various aspects such as sacrifice, marriage and death, cultivation, age, leisure, housekeeping, upbringing, religion, and interpersonal communication, which are not only the summary and refinement of villagers’ daily life, but also a reference for their daily behavior. A member of a traditional blood or geographical group since he was a child accepts and learns these customs and habits under the guidance of his parents from the day he comes into contact with the outside world. With the transformation of these customs from “heteronomy” to “autonomy”, and with external constraints gradually becoming an internal psychological accumulation and behavior mode, etiquette and custom become a tradition passed down from generation to generation in the succession of blood or geographical groups. Fei Xiaotong described the process of civilizing a person by the customs of local society: We grown-ups feel that we can do things in ways we like, but we must understand that this freedom is earned from more than a decade of unfreedom. The social shackles are not removed, but we are used to them. If only we could see no evil, speak no evil, and do no evil, we would be able to move around like a skilled player without breaking the rules. We have to put away our instincts that are at odds with social life, and develop a set of coping habits that the free world can achieve. In the formation of this habit, there are times to be rebuked, to be whipped, to be shut up in a dark house, to be threatened with being deprived of food—all sorts of unpleasant and unfree experiences were inevitable. (Fei, 1998: 191) The reason why rites and customs are a tradition is that they are not only accumulated by blood or geographical group members, but also accepted by every member of rural society as a kind of spiritual heritage. However, etiquette and custom are not ordinary traditions. For each member of a family or geographical group, etiquette and custom are beyond doubt and irrevocable. Therefore, it is a sanctified tradition, which cannot be easily abandoned because rural China is a society that changes very slowly. In such a society, the mountains and waters are not easily changed, the way of farming is not easily changed, the content of life is not easily changed, and the whole living world faced by the villagers is not easily changed. The slow pace of change gives validity to tradition, and young people can cope with the life problems they encounter just as their predecessors did with the sanctified tradition of custom. The sameness of these life problems naturally leads to a consistency in the way two or more generations deal with them. Therefore, the Soviet historian Mironov states that there is no cultural and ideological conflict in traditional village communities (Mironov, 1989: 66). Of course, the emphasis on the filial piety of “no violation” or slow social change can only eliminate the differences between parents and children, but

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will not completely eliminate the separation and contradiction between them. The source of this gap or contradiction is that no matter in what kind of society, there will be contradiction or conflict between the ideal and reality in individual life. Things do not always turn out the way we want them to, and the regrets we feel about our actions often last a lifetime. In order to resolve this contradiction or conflict, Nietzsche conceived of “Do it again”; the average person, on the other hand, “takes off some of the burden of regret and fulfills the desire to be born again” by having a child (Fei, 1998: 202). In this way, every child, at the moment of birth, undertakes the task of realizing the ideal for their realistic parents. But this task will not be easy for two reasons: First, the ideal, though beautiful, is not easy to achieve—parents’ expectations are mixed with excessive social requirements, and there is a price to pay for each step—otherwise parents do not need to leave their children to complete the work; second, after all, children are children, “they cannot fully understand their parents’ feelings; since they cannot understand, naturally there is no way to fulfill their ideals and obey their will” (Fei, 1998: 207). Thus, even in rural society, it is not easy for children to satisfy their parents completely. However, we should not regard this gap as a generation gap, because there are no differences in values and social behaviors between parents and children, but only between personal reality and parents’ expectations. From the concept of filial piety in the parent–child relationship, there will naturally be two other similar rules to deal with in interpersonal relationships: One is seniority, the other is the teacher’s dignity. Therefore, filial piety shows that in the social education of rural China, emphasis is not only on the inequality between generations, but also on seniority within the same generation. The elder–younger hierarchy is highlighted in rural China because, first, in the patriarchal family system, the elder brother is the first to arrive from the perspective of consanguinity, so he has the dignity of social status (first-borns, though a biological issue, are endowed with powers and duties that no one else has). Second, since local society changes only slowly year by year, the elderly must have experienced the people and things that the young have just experienced or will experience in the future, so they naturally have the knowledge and ability to teach the young how to cope with certain situations. Thus, “every elder has the power of indoctrination to compel the younger: ‘to respect seniority’, that is, one has to be respectful and obedient to the older people” (Fei, 1998: 67). Fei Xiaotong mentioned that his teacher, the Russian Sergei Mikhailovich Shirokogorov, suggested to him that the separation of the ages is the most basic principle in the Chinese kinship system, which sometimes masks the principle of generations. However, Fei Xiaotong did not mention that the reason why the age division is sometimes more important than the generation principle is because, within the whole society, this principle often loses its effect because of the incompatibility of consanguinity, though the age division is a constant determination of the seniority standard. In other words, only by emphasizing the order of seniority can filial piety and its corresponding virtues be extended to the daily life of the whole society and finally become a social or political virtue.

46 Intergenerational relations To some extent, “the dignity of the teacher” is also an extension of the parent– child filial piety advocated by Confucianism in the non-parent–child relationship. Therefore, Confucius advocated: “A youth should be filial at home and respectful to seniors when away from home; be modest and prudent, honest and trustworthy; be philanthropic and beneficent; with spare energy, learn knowledge” (The Analects of Confucius), paralleling filial piety at home with respect to teachers out of the home. Accordingly, the traditional Chinese requirements for teachers and the requirements for parents are very similar—that is, teachers should be a combination of strict father and loving mother, and use a combination of carrot and stick in teaching. To emphasize the dignity of teachers, Confucian culture has always exalted their importance. Mencius said, “God makes people, together with leaders and teachers for them” (Mencius: King Hui of Liang), paralleling teachers with leaders. Then, Xuncius further put forward the “teacher doctrines”, namely that “the heaven and earth is the source of beings, the ancestors of species, leaders and teachers of order” (Xuncius: Lilun). In rural society, the teacher has such a lofty status because he has institutionalized or professionalized educational power, which is irreplaceable in a society where the sources and channels of knowledge are very singular. In this way, Xunzi naturally proposes that “a man without a teacher cannot learn, so he will end up to be a thief. A man with a teacher can learn fast and efficiently” (Xuncius: Ruxiao). Similarly, Han Yu also stressed that “the essentials of teaching are proselytizing, instructing, and dispelling doubts” (Shishuo), and that “whoever knows the way is a teacher”. Of course, if a teacher wants to have the right to educate, he or she must take moral articles as the premise. He or she should not only have the elegance and integrity of the “gentleman” and “nobleman”, but also have good education and profound knowledge (Rong, 2007). Consequently, it was said in Liji: Xueji that “rote-learning knowledge does not suffice for teaching”, and teachers need to know the depth of the students, the inequality of their qualifications, and try various ways to induce them in teaching. Only those who are good at inducing others can be teachers; those who can be teachers can be officers; those who can be officers can be emperors. Frankly speaking, Confucianism does not completely absolutize the relationship between teachers and students. Han Yu stated that: It is so that the disciple doesn’t need to be inferior to the teacher, nor does the teacher need to be more virtuous than the disciple. It is only a matter of the sequence of learning, and of the difference in specialization. That’s it. (Shishuo) When we conducted interviews on “cultural reverse”, some interviewees took this as an ancient example of cultural reverse. Indeed, although in rural China social change is slow, and intergenerational relations are subject to the strict tradition of filial piety and the dignity of teachers, as a result of Han Yu’s claim

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that “it is only a matter of the sequence of learning, and of the difference in specialization”, and the fact that different people’s IQ level and diligence are different, the assertion that the disciple is stronger than the teacher certainly exists, and the assertion that the father is inferior to the son is also not uncommon. But the biggest difference between this phenomenon and what we call cultural reverse is this: The former only exists as a specific case in a particular family or between teachers and students. The reason why parents are not as good as children or teachers is simply because of the “sequence of learning”, the difference in profession, and the difference in IQ and diligence. The imperial examination system, which was gradually established from the Sui dynasty and constantly improved through selection, examination, doctoral study, and other procedures, has for thousands of years been guided by the “four books and five classics”2 and the customized and rigid “eight-part essay”, which has suffocated the creativity of young Chinese intellectuals fundamentally. The latter, however, appears throughout the whole of society and is really a kind of “the father being not a father, the son being not a son” intergenerational subversion phenomenon. It does not depend on the time of practice, similarities and differences in the specializations, or even on intelligence and diligence, but only has something to do with the great changes of the intergenerational living environment over the past 40 years. Moreover, the phenomenon that the parents are inferior to the children or the elders are inferior to the juniors is not limited to the “remembering” or understanding of certain kinds of knowledge, as well as the mastery and alienation of a particular profession. On the contrary, it involves almost all fields of values, life attitudes, behavioral patterns, and the object culture. In other words, this all-round gap between parents and children or between generations is a cultural lag in another sense.3 Only by realizing this can we truly understand the unprecedented historical significance of cultural reverse.

The dawn of revolution The writing of modern Chinese history began in 1840. In the Opium War of that year, Western powers opened the closed door of China, an ancient empire, with powerful ships and cannons. Faced with the challenge of survival from the outside world, China was forced to step onto the threshold of modernity, and its culture began to face crisis and disintegration. In Marx’s words, British artillery destroyed the Chinese emperor’s authority and forced the empire to engage with the rest of the world. Complete isolation from the outside world had been the primary condition for the preservation of old China, and when this isolation was violently broken by British efforts, it was followed by a process of disintegration, just as a mummy carefully preserved in a closed coffin inevitably disintegrates at the touch of fresh air (Marx & Engels, 1972: 3). Faced with this crisis, a group of relatively acute Chinese people apprehended the progress of Western civilization, so they came up with the idea of “learning from foreigners to control them” and later the idea of “Chinese culture as the basis, and Western culture for application”. The Westernization movement was

48 Intergenerational relations the concrete application of this idea. People like Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, and Zhang Zhidong “gradually learned the strengths of Western culture, so they established manufacturing bureaus to make machines and translate books, set up dialect stations, founded investment promotion bureaus, and sent students overseas” (Chinese History Society, 1957: 18). Although this idea that one could enrich the country and strengthen the army by imitating the Western enterprises was soon destroyed in the defeat of the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–1895, which prompted subsequent reformers to realize that learning from the West at the material and cultural levels only would not work, or, as Kang Youwei put it, “nothing can be done right unless the fundamentals are clearly understood” (Chinese History Society, 1957: 178). To this end, a group of people with lofty ideals began to advocate the fundamental reform of the system in China. Although the 100-day-reform movement they advocated failed tragically, it pushed the task of China’s modernization from the material level to the institutional level. In 1905, the imperial examination system, which had lasted for 1,300 years, was abolished, fundamentally shaking the dynamic foundation and metabolic mechanism of the feudal political system, which also laid the foundation for the revolution of 1911 and the new May Fourth cultural movement. Although the 1911 revolution overthrew the Manchu dynasty, which had lasted for more than 260 years, and ended the feudal autocratic system of China that had endured for more than 2,000 years, the thoughts and social mentality of most people are still bound by autocracy and ignorance. For this reason, Chinese Enlightenment thinkers like Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Hu Shi, Qian Xuantong, Lu Xun, and Zhou Zuoren held high the banner of “science” and “democracy” after 1915, declaring war against traditional culture, with Confucianism as the core, and the patriarchal family system, and put forward the slogan of “Down with Confucius”. Joseph R. Levenson, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, argued that the: Chinese world in which science had to be owned, to be captured, was the very world in which Confucius could only be captured. He could not be free and dominant. Where science was all-pervasive (even seeping into the rhetoric that described the social system), Confucius was under lock and key and glass. (Levenson, 1968: 81) The reason why the New Youth magazine, the torch of the May Fourth Movement, would regard “Down with Confucius” as the first fire to burn Chinese traditional culture may be more complicated than Levenson’s analysis. From the historical background of that time, there are at least several factors that cannot be ignored. First, during the restoration of the imperial system, Yuan Shikai played with Confucian symbols arbitrarily (e.g., he went to the Temple of Heaven to perform the ancient ritual of “worshiping heaven” and participated in the activity of “worshiping Confucius”), which made Chen Duxiu and other young intellectuals deeply believe that “Confucianism and the imperial system have an inseparable bond”. Next, after the failure of the reform movement of

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1898, Kang Youwei, in order to express his strong desire to participate in politics, actively tried to promote Confucianism, trying to make it the state religion, which also made Chen Duxiu and other intellectuals realize “how deeply rooted the theory and practice of Confucianism in the Chinese people’s thoughts and behavior is” (Lin, 1986: 113). Finally, fundamentally, the failure of the Westernization movement and the reform movement of 1898 led a large number of Chinese Enlightenment thinkers to develop a theory aimed at following Lin Yusheng’s “approach to solve problems by means of ideology and culture”, that is, to prevent poverty and weakness in China from thoroughly subverting the Confucian ideological system. With the slogan “Down with Confucius”, feudal filial piety, the core of Confucian morality, naturally became the target of the May Fourth new cultural movement. In his essay “The way of Confucius and modern life”, Chen Duxiu concluded that the filial piety of “three years without changing from the way of the father” suppressed the individual’s independent beliefs and spirit (Chen, 1986: 54). Li Dazhao pointed out: To sum up the ethics of Confucius, in the relationship between the king and the minister, there is only one word, “loyalty”, so that the minister completely sacrifices for the king; in the relationship between father and son, there is only one word, “filial piety”, so that the son completely sacrifices for the father. … The ethics of Confucianism are the ethics of making disciples sacrifice themselves completely to support their dignity, and the ethics of Confucianism are the ethics of absolute power with the ruler and partial obligation with the governed. (Li, 1984: 179) In Li Dazhao’s opinion, the ethical codes of the three principles and five constants, with filial piety and respect for the aged as the core, are just historic, with their origin in farming society, but they are not eternal truths: “Chinese principles and constants, ethical codes, and morals are built on the big family. The change of Chinese thought is a symptom of the collapse of the family system” (Li, 1984: 179). If Chen Duxiu blazed the first fire in “Down with Confucius” and Hu Shi took the lead in advocating a literary revolution, Lu Xun was the veritable leader in criticizing traditional personalities and transforming the national character. In “The diary of a madman”, Lu Xun made a penetrating indictment of Chinese traditional culture through the mouth of madmen. Chinese history is a history of cannibalism: No date is given on this history book, only scrawled characters for virtue and morality on each single page. As I couldn’t fall asleep, I studied carefully the characters and finally managed to read the word “cannibalism” hidden in the lines … With this four-thousand-year history of man-eating, I can now understand what I remained unconscious of in the past—there is

50 Intergenerational relations no genuine man! Maybe there still exist children who haven’t eaten any other people yet, but who knows? Save our children. (Lu, 2005, Vol. 1: 447–455) In order to “save our children”, Lu Xun published “How should we be fathers now?” in the New Youth in 1919, criticizing traditional filial piety and discussing how to transform the intergenerational relations of traditional China in the face of the great changes of the times: This can be divided into two layers: First, Chinese society, although “morally good”, is too lacking in love and help. Even such morality as “filial piety” and “virtue” is but a way to deal with the young and the weak. In such a society, it is difficult to live not only for the old, but also for the liberated young. Second, most Chinese men and women are getting old before they are even twenty years old. When they get really old, they need support. So I say, parents who liberate their children should first have some preparation; as for such a society, it must be especially reformed to make it fit for a reasonable life. (Lu, 2005, Vol. 1: 142–143) Lu Xun not only saw the inequality between generations under the feudal family system, but also realized that to thoroughly reform this inequality, so that the “liberated young” could live reasonably, it was necessary to reform the society that “only targets the young and the weak”. Although thousands of years of feudal rule made “China’s old people too poisoned by old habits and old ideas to wake up anyway”, Lu Xun still called for a: starting from those who wake up first and liberating their own children. They bear the burden of old hereditary habits, the floodgates of darkness, and let their children go into the wide and bright place, letting them live happily ever after and behave reasonably. (Lu, 2005, Vol. 1: 142–143; 135) Under the influence of the outside world, through the 1911 revolution and the May Fourth Movement, ancient China, from the coastal areas first, gradually imposed new approaches: To be materially and culturally subservient to the exemplary effects of the West; the economy to be based on modern commerce and industry with a corresponding cultural transfer; there to be dual sovereignty and standards in administration and justice due to the existence of concessions; and, finally, society to be all-round open to the world (Cohen, 1989: 144–145). This openness, despite its failures and humiliations, led to the transformation of the ancient Chinese empire towards modernity. The changes were from artifacts to culture, and then from culture to the level of values and social mentality; they came from the West into China, and from coastal cities like Shanghai, Beijing, and Nanjing to small and medium-sized cities, then to the countryside in the coastal areas and the Yangtze river basin. The tradition unchanged for

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thousands of years began to face severe challenges in the process of contacting the modern. In “My country and my people”, published in 1939, Lin Yutang described the radical changes that took place in Chinese society during the first 40 years of the 20th century in stirring language: Within 10 years, because of the introduction of western political ideas, the empire was declared dead, and the republic was proclaimed. It does not matter that the republic did not succeed as a form of government; only ideologues would expect it to succeed at once. What matters is the emergence of a new, progressive and bellicose civilization with very different values that challenges and threatens to swallow up its former civilization. … The essence of these new ideas are so extensive that they include not only the introduction of all kinds of science, philosophy and scientific methods, but also the abolition of the imperial examination system, alteration of the education system, the content and methods of education, knowledge popularization, the change of scholars’ status, the reform of written language, the introduction of new terms, the innovation of literary style, women’s liberation, criticism of foot binding and concubinage, and the collapse of Confucianism, the family system, monarchy system and township system, even the rupture with some fundamental cultural values, like seniority and authority, face, fate, grace, law, privileges and equality, government facilities, nationalism and patriotism, and personal attitude to society. (Lin, 2000: 339–340) Indeed, since modern times, a group of youths with the characteristics of the “new citizens” expected by Liang Qichao have become the real backbone of the Chinese nation. In order to overthrow the imperial system and create a new civilization, there were first the six gentlemen of the Hundred Days’ Reform (when they were executed outside Beijing Caishikou, Tan Sitong was only 33, and Lin Xu was even younger, at only 24), followed by a large number of young heroes “seeking the eternal happiness of world people” (Lin, 1926), who died young for long-suffering China: Chen Tianhua was 30; Qiu Jin, 32; Wu Yue, 27; Lu Haodong, 27; Xiong Chengji, 23; Zou Rong, 20; Peng Jialing, 24; Shi Jianru, 21; and Lin Juemin, who wrote that poetic masterpiece “To my wife”, was no more than 24 (Wu, 2001).4 In addition to these people with lofty ideals who sacrificed their lives for justice, there are thousands of students who went overseas to seek advice from science and democracy. Similarly, “many communist youths in Edgar Snow’s Red Star over China ‘and the Hunan women soldiers marching barefoot with rifles and backpacks’” (Lin, 2000: 340–341) were role models for the new youth. In fact, in the face of the tide of big times, the prescience of the younger generation is not only reflected in the above heroic sacrifice and exploration, but also in ordinary daily life. In 1927, social scientist Pan Guangdan carried out a survey on marriage and family through The China Times in 15 provinces, including Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Some of the survey questions involved the parent–son relationship and views on the patriarchal clan system, and results

52 Intergenerational relations showed that young people with modern education exhibited an obvious modernist tendency.5 For example, when it comes to the purpose of marriage, although respondents ranked “production and education of good children”, “romantic life and partners”, and “service of parents” in the top three, 48% of those who had received college education or above put “romantic life and partner” in the first place, causing Pan Guangdan, who advocated “eugenics” all his life, to worry that it would not be conducive to the continuation of the family, social stability, and the race, and to attribute it to the misfortune of modern education.6 Also, 86.5% of the respondents believed that women above 20 and men above 25 were at the best age to get married. At the same time, a whopping 93.3% of urban intellectuals opposed marriage being entirely decided by parents or other elders, indicating that late marriage and freedom of marriage had become overwhelming mainstream concepts among them. Finally, regarding the aspect of ancestor sacrifice, the concept that “the sacrifice of ancestors, with its full mysterious religious value, should be protected and reinforced” was clearly opposed by 85.5% (Pan, 1993). The change of customs, as well as the prescience of the younger generation and the conservatism of the feudal elders, will naturally provide a tragedy of contradiction and conflict between parents and children or between generations and, naturally, the numerous “venerable masters”, who symbolize the feudal patriarchy, face the challenge of the more rebellious Chuehhui and Chuehmin, while stifling weak Chuehhsin’s yearning for a new life—the latter’s unrelenting departure of the feudal family is the most vivid scene involving the “cutting off with blood and tears” mentioned by Fei Xiaotong in the Fertility System. And how many such “unfilial” stories happened in the great transition period of the late Qing dynasty and the early republic of China? Not only Ba Jin and his two elder brothers Li Yaomei and Li Yaolin walked out of their official family and Sichuan province, but also Guo Moruo, who later became the flag bearer of Chinese new culture, ran Kuimen and went to Japan to study abroad. In the old residence of Guo Moruo in Shawan, Sichuan province, you can see how Guo Moruo’s democracy was baptized by the tide of new culture after 1906 when he studied at Jiading Higher School, Chengdu Affiliated High School, and Chengdu Higher School. In October 1913, at the age of 21, Guo Moruo left Sichuan. He traveled from Chengdu to Chongqing, then down the Yangtze river, and finally to Japan. It took several months before he arrived in Tokyo in January the following year. Mountains and rivers could not stop rebellious Guo Moruo and his kind from their pursuit of freedom and a bright future. As early as in 2003, when I was engaged in interviewing for cultural reverse, Professor Lu Jie, who has been engaged in the research of educational sociology all his life, told me a story about how his father came out of Sichuan and how he was influenced by his brother and sister: Our hometown is Langzhong county, Sichuan province. Langzhong ancient city is located on the Jialing river, and it shares four ancient cities with Lijiang of Yunnan Province, Pingyao of Shanxi Province and Shexian of

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Anhui Province. Langzhong was once the capital of the state of Ba in the middle of the Warring States period. In 314 BC, when Qin destroyed Ba, King Hui of Qin established Langzhong county, which has a history of more than 2,300 years. However, Langzhong county, located on the west bank of Jialing river, has always been an important military town in Sichuan province, which is surrounded by mountains and water in three directions to form a natural barrier. It not only enjoys the reputation of “rare scenery”, but also forms a very closed geographical environment. Although located in a remote place, my father was influenced by the new ideological trend at a very early age because he went to church school. He left home resolutely and went to Shanghai, where new thoughts and culture came together at that time. After graduating from Columbia University in the United States, he returned to China and became provost of Shanghai Daxia University. So, my brother and sister were born in Shanghai. In the 1940s, my brother Lu Ping, after watching the Soviet film Collective Farm, decided to study agriculture, and was admitted to the college of agriculture of St. John’s University. Influenced by my father, I was admitted to the education department of Jinling Women’s University. Nevertheless, although father is a professor returning from overseas, because my elder brother and I had already stealthily joined an underground party at that time, we often had debates with my father about the current situation at home, and my father was gradually able to accept some new ideas including communism. So I think between my father and his father, between my father and my brother and sister, there is what you call cultural reverse. (Interview with Lu Jie, 2003) In fact, in the first half of the last century, great changes took place in society, as well as in family relations and intergenerational relations in China. During the eight-year War of Resistance from 1937 to 1945, young Chinese intellectuals also became the backbone of our national resistance to foreign aggression. Not only did many young intellectuals go directly to the front lines of the War of Resistance, but they and young students accounted for a considerable proportion of the exodus from the war zone. According to Sun’s estimation, during the war of resistance against Japanese aggression, Chinese intellectuals and national elites moved westward to the rear area of the Communist Party of China in Sichuan Province (Sun, 2012, Vol. 6: 385). In addition to their relatively strong mobility and earning ability, what is more important is that in the process of accepting modern Western civilization, they formed a distinct modern national consciousness or sense of national identity, and became more sensitive to the pain of national subjugation than ordinary people. It should be noted that the above changes are still quite limited for the following reasons. First of all, China’s feudal society lasted for thousands of years, and the traditional ethics, family ethics, and intergenerational relations thus determined could not collapse completely in just a few decades. This fact proves that society still had an extremely indomitable vitality that lasted for quite a long time after

54 Intergenerational relations that. Second, China is a big country with an area of 9.6 million square kilometers. In the process of its modernization, there were huge economic and social differences between urban and rural areas, coastal areas and inland areas. Therefore, after the new Republic of China, the breeze only blew to the young intellectuals in coastal large and medium-sized cities, while the rest of society was still in a muddle. Third, the invasion by Japanese imperialism ruined the “golden years” (1927–1937) that lasted for only a decade after the founding of the nationalist government, after which ill-fated China effectively interrupted its brief modernization process until 1949. The new atmosphere and changes that had just taken place ended.

The rebellion as a hypercorrection The modern history of Chinese society is illuminated by the 1949 revolution. But a violent revolution against feudal and colonial culture has, over the last 30 years or so since its victory, formed stronger traditions, or “new traditions” as Walder puts it (Walder, 1986). This was something the revolutionaries themselves had not anticipated. In the nearly 30 years after 1949, such institutional changes and extensive social movements as land reform, resistance to American aggression and aid to Korea, cooperation, the Great Leap Forward, the people’s commune, the socialist education movement, learning from Dazhai on agriculture, and the Cultural Revolution in mainland China have, to a considerable extent, influenced the expectations and choices of Chinese people, as well as family ethics and intergenerational relations in their society. The 1949 victory was a landmark event for the Chinese communists, who began to change their ideals in a country that had suffered so much for more than a century. To transform China with Marxism means the demise of Confucianism, the foundation of traditional Chinese culture. The land reform and the suppression of counter-revolution destroyed the landlord or gentry class psychologically, socially, and even physically. In the end, as Shurmann puts it, “the new marriage act symbolizes the liberation of women and the eventual collapse of paternalism” (Schurmann, 1971: 7). The victory in 1950–1953 not only removed all possible political and military crises from the new regime, but also, most importantly, increased the prestige of Mao Zedong and the legitimacy of the Communist Party of China. By the end of 1956, the socialist system had been established in China. Naturally, learning from and following the Soviet Union’s path was the only way to build and develop socialism in China. The Soviet model was characterized by a high degree of centralization, which maximized the concentration of national resources in certain regions and sectors in a short period of time, giving priority to industrialization, though this system naturally curbed the development of the market and commodity economy, and prevented the establishment of the democratic system promised by Mao Zedong. The policy of unified purchase and marketing of agriculture established after 1953 strengthened the state’s control over the agricultural products market, and the establishment

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of the household registration system strengthened the state’s control over the floating population. In this context, a relatively self-sufficient and highly closed economy was born. Coupled with the Korean War in 1950 and the deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations from the 1960s, China faced hostility and blockade from both the east and the west, so a hundred years after it was forced to open up, the country, already disastrous, was once again being forced to turn its back on the world. At the same time, internal social integration had reached an unprecedented level in order to unify the thoughts and actions within and outside the Party. Politically, the “three counter-revolts and five revolts”, the “suppression of counter-revolution”, and the “anti-right” movements not only destroyed the class enemies ideologically and even physically, but also quickly silenced the whole society, which had only been a little active. Economically, mutual-aid groups and cooperatives, the unified purchase and marketing of agricultural products, public–private partnerships, and the socialist transformation of industry and commerce also strangled active market factors. All this allowed the Party and the state to control the entire economy and social life to the point of their own free will, and made Mao Zedong’s leadership more ambitious than ever. After 1958, the people’s commune and the Great Leap Forward movement appeared out of the blue: the Party and the state realized the socialization of the people in just a few months by borrowing from the traditional egalitarian mentality of the peasants and by various policy levers. Almost at the same time, the Great Leap Forward wave swept across the country: In agriculture, the slogan “How bold the people are, how productive the land is” was put forward (Zhou, 1998a: 184–185). The industry proposed using 5–15 years to catch up with the United States in steel and other major industrial products (Bo, 1997: 716–720). In response, there was a steady stream of jaw-dropping madness (Li, 1996; Ling, 1996), which finally led to the starvation of tens of millions of people for three consecutive years from 1959 to 1961. Disaster did not halt the fever. After a brief period of adjustment, in 1962, in order to stabilize China after the famine and, more importantly, to stabilize his own position in the Party, Mao Zedong re-emphasized the importance of class struggle and pointed the blame at the Party and at comrades who disagreed with him. In the following “four clean-ups movement”, “learning from Dazhai village in agriculture”, and a series of other movements, Mao Zedong hoped to use class struggle to “consolidate and develop the positions of socialism in urban and rural areas by integrating those members of the party who take the capitalist road” (The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, 1982: 693). In 1966, the Cultural Revolution broke out, and this nationwide turbulence made the whole nation, with its 900 million people, reach a peak of insanity. When discussing the relationship between the state and society, I pointed out that after 1949, not only did state control over society become increasingly strict, but also, because the leadership of the Party or Mao Zedong himself gradually began to distrust the country that had been established, the Party also mobilized grass-roots society to continuously reform and reconstruct the country

56 Intergenerational relations (Zhou, 2000a). In 1966, young people, especially students, became the main force for Mao Zedong to realize his ideal of transformation and reconstruction. The reason he placed a “historical responsibility” on the students was partly because he believed that the 17 years of restoration of capitalism after the founding of the People’s Republic of China had become so entrenched that “only through great chaos can we achieve great governance”, or “no new order can be established without first breaking the old one”.7 He had always believed that “youth is part of the most dynamic force in society. They are the most studious and the least conservative, especially in socialist times” (Mao, 1978: 246). On the other hand, since 1964, Mao Zedong thought that education was divorced from reality and repeatedly proposed carrying out the “education revolution”. After 1966, he even regarded education as a “disaster area” of bourgeois rule (Zhou, 1999: 22–54). Mao Zedong’s rebellious spirit against tradition has a long history (Snow, 1937: 128–129). Although he began to receive private education from the age of eight, mainly learning Confucian culture, this had achieved a “counterproductive” effect, that is “Confucian precepts of deference toward those in authority aroused in Zedong a hatred for the two adults who hemmed him in: teacher and father” (Terrill, 1980: 9). When he grew up, Mao Zedong’s criticism of traditional education was no less fierce than that of cultural pioneers such as Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi during the May Fourth Movement, a view he maintained his whole life. In an earlier article, “The great union of the masses”, he vehemently opposed the destruction of the young people in the old school: “We are so bitter. Our master views us like enemies, treats us like slaves, and shuts us up as prisoners, destroying not only our spirit, but also our body” (Mao, 1917). In response, Scalapino wrote in “The evolution of a young revolutionary: Mao Zedong, 1919–1921”: “Like many of his generation, he believed that a strong China required Chinese of both physical and intellectual vigor” (Scalapino, 1982: 31). In this respect, little seems to have changed between the young and the old Mao Zedong. In 1950, just a year after taking office, he wrote to Ma Xulun, the minister of education: “Schools should pay attention to health first and study second” (Zhou, 1999: 22). In 1965, he and his nephew, Wang Hairong, who was studying at Beijing Foreign Studies University, had a conversation that was more sobering than amusing: MAO:

Does your teacher allow you to doze off in class? What about reading novels? Teachers should allow students to read novels in class, to allow students to doze off in class, so as to take good care of the body. Teachers should speak less and let students read more. I think that student you talked about will make a difference because he dares not attend the meeting on Saturday and come back to school on time on Sunday. You tell the student that eight or nine o’clock is too early to go back to school; he can go back at eleven or twelve. Who asked them to have the meeting in the evening! When you get back, you can lead the rebellion. Don’t go back on Sunday, and don’t go to the meeting.

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WANG:

I dare not. It’s a school policy. All students must go back to school on Sundays, otherwise you will be accused of breaking the school system. MAO: You’re not going to do much. You are afraid of being criticized, of getting demerits, of being expelled from school or not being admitted to the Communist Party. There’s nothing to be afraid of! Being expelled at most! The school should allow the students to rebel and you should take the lead. (Zhou, 1999: 37–38) It is no coincidence that this discussion of “insurrection” occurred a year before the Cultural Revolution. It suggests that Mao Zedong had a long history of thinking about preventing the restoration of capitalism through “educational revolution” or youth insurrection. In the case of students, the reason why Mao Zedong’s encouragement had such a great social mobilization effect was due not only to the irreplaceable political prestige that he had established, but also to the continuous normalization of the education system and the increasingly tense intergenerational relations in China over the 17 years after 1949. Although various educational reforms had been carried out in China’s education after 1949, due to the regularization requirements of modern education and the influence of the educational system of the Soviet Union, some characteristics of rigid education, especially restricting students’ creativity, had formed. For society as a whole, on the one hand, the advancement of modern bureaucracy and the emphasis on seniority—for example, the rank of a cadre that symbolizes a person’s status depends not only on the position he holds, but also on the number of years he has been “engaged in revolutionary work”—naturally make young people with a high educational level, as Davis-Friedmann said, play a lower subordinate role in the social system (Davis-Friedmann, 1991). In fact, since its founding, the Communist Youth League had always emphasized its nature as an assistant of the Party, which also reflected the nature of intergenerational relations in political and social life to a certain extent (Pringsheim, 1962). On the other hand, in family life, because of the omnipresent interference of the state in the daily life of individuals, the demands of the state or work (such as the Great Leap Forward, day and night), and even the endless political movements often deprive parents and children of the possibility of daily emotional communication to a certain extent—parents are either too busy with work or too “revolutionary” to care about their children (revolutionaries and love have always been in opposition). Hence children will naturally lack affection or respect for their authoritative parents or teachers, especially those retained from the older society. People’s basic attitude towards family relations and affection is summed up as “proximity is distinguished by class”. In Li Nanyang’s I Have Such a Mother and Lao Gui’s Mother Yang Mo, Fan Yuanzhen and Yang Mo are typical “Marxist–Leninist old ladies” who present a very “alternative” mother image. On the one hand, they are selfless, conscientious, and dedicated to the Revolution, while on the other hand, they are cold, sadistic, and unwilling to give—not to mention sacrifice—to their children (Li, 2004b; Lao, 2005).8 In fact, even in the average family at that time, the tolerance,

58 Intergenerational relations democracy, and even doting parent–child relationship that emerged in the onechild families after the 1980s was generally invisible, because of the constant political movements, large numbers of children, and the great pressures of life.9 Under such a system and social environment, Mao Zedong’s idea of ending what he called the “bourgeois reactionary line” by raising young students to rebel through education would naturally quickly be echoed by the younger generation. On May 6, 1966, in a document concerning agricultural and sideline production issued by the general logistics department, Mao Zedong wrote an instruction which became known as the “May 7 Directive”. The instruction that “the school system should be shortened, education should be revolutionized, and the domination of our schools by bourgeois intellectuals cannot continue any longer”, and the subsequent adoption of the “May 16 Notice”, ignited the flames of the Cultural Revolution. On the afternoon of May 25, Nie Yuanzi and others of Peking University posted a communication to a major newspaper asking what the leaders of the University wanted to do in the Cultural Revolution. Mao Zedong immediately praised this newspaper, which led to nationwide unrest in schools after it was broadcast to the whole country by the Central People’s Radio Station on the evening of June 1, 1966. At about the same time, on May 29, Zhang Chengzhi, a student at Tsinghua High School who later became famous for writing Black Beauty, adopted the name “Red Guards”, which was adopted by students opposed to the school’s educational line, thus the Red Guards, the organization which later shocked the world, was first born among the students of the Affiliated High School of Tsinghua University.10 Soon after, the Red Guards at Tsinghua High School wrote “Long live the revolutionary and rebellious spirit of the proletariat”, based on a conversation between Mao Zedong and Wang Hairong, and “On the revolutionary spirit of the proletariat again” as well as “On the revolutionary spirit of the proletariat a third time” soon after.11 In “On the revolutionary spirit of the proletariat again” on July 4, Luo Xiaohai, Bu Dahua, Wang Ming, and other Red Guards at the High School attached to Tsinghua University quoted a passage from Mao Zedong’s “Speech at the celebration of Stalin’s 60th birthday” in 1939: “Marxism has a thousand principles, which, in the final analysis, can be summed up in one sentence: rebellion is justified” (Mao, 1966, Vol. 1: 37). After reading these posters, Mao Zedong wrote a letter to the Red Guards of Tsinghua High School on August 1, affirming their spirit of rebellion. And in August 18, at a gathering of 1 million people in Tiananmen Square to “celebrate the cultural revolution of the proletariat”, for the first time after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong wore a grass green military uniform and cheerfully wore the armband of the Red Guards given to him by Song Binbin, a Red Guard from the Affiliated High School of Beijing Normal University. In the following three months, he received Red Guards across the country eight times, a total of 11 million people. As a result, the Red Guard movement surged across the country, outward from Beijing. It took two years from then until July 27, 1968 before Mao Zedong sent out 30,000 members of the “workers’ propaganda team for Mao Zedong thought”

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to Beijing colleges and universities in order to stabilize the overturning of the school order and to put an end to the increasing fighting in the whole of society, before finally leading to the collapse of the Red Guard movement (Ito & Shibata, 1968; Hinton, 1972: 185–215; Jiang, 1994: 227–237). During these two years, the Red Guards’ rebellion was beyond the limits of human civilization, which was jaw-dropping. After the breaking of the “four olds” (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits) was proposed by the People’s Daily on June 1, 1966, Red Guards across the country began to frantically destroy ancient buildings, temples, cultural relics, costumes and props, and changed the names of the roads in many cities. For example, the “Yangwei Road” in front of the Soviet embassy in China was renamed “Antirevisionist Road”. Hundreds of thousands of democratic parties and intellectuals were driven out of Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities and “sent back” to their places of origin, and their cultural antiques, money, gold, and silver were confiscated. Inspired by Mao Zedong and the central Cultural Revolution, from June 1966 to March 1967, tens of millions of Red Guards formed a series of “Red Guard chains” (Wang, 1988: 77–79). Numerous social elites, including the marshal of the republic, the wife of the president, the minister of the state council, the leader of the Democratic Party, the panchen lama, writers, artists, and senior intellectuals, were seized and fought with. They even beat to death with a brass belt Bian Zhongyun, Vice President of the High School Affiliated to the Beijing Normal University, while Lao She, the playwright, Fu Lei, the translator, and his wife, and Li Da, the President of Wuhan University, drowned or hanged themselves out of humiliation. In this Red Guard rebellion movement, because on the one hand students had been subject to the strict control of teachers in their study and life for years, and because on the other hand of Mao Zedong’s “bourgeois” attribute of teachers and other intellectuals, teachers first became the object of hatred and attack by students. According to incomplete statistics, in the Red Guard rebellion in Beijing alone, “tens of thousands of university, middle school and primary school teachers were abused” (Wang, 1988: 86). Although the “dignity of teachers” advocated by Chinese society for thousands of years was severely criticized in the May Fourth Movement, it was completely overturned at this moment. As educators, teachers became not only the targets of education and criticism, but also the prisoners of the students. Chen Xiaolu, son of Marshal Chen Yi, was also studying in Beijing No. 8 Middle School. Like almost all the elite children at that time, he was also the first one to rise up and become the founder of the famous Red Guard picket in Xicheng district of Beijing. His initial performance and that of a large number of young Red Guards added an indelible footnote to the subversion of intergenerational relations in China during the Cultural Revolution: Xiaolu was chosen to head the cultural revolution committee, an autonomous body organized entirely by students, and took over all power at the school. He stood at the lectern and announced to the teachers who were at the lectern and behind the desks today, “In the past three mothers educated their child, while it is the child who educates his mothers in the present

60 Intergenerational relations and future!” Boys who hate homework and fear exams are delighted, and teachers applaud enthusiastically to show their support of the cultural revolution. (Ji, 1993: 147) When interpreting the intergenerational relations of Chinese society during the Cultural Revolution, there are two other issues that should be considered. First, why did the Red Guards use violence to deal with their elders? Second, what role did “blood theory” play in the early rebellion of the Red Guards? Violence has long been a part of intergenerational relations in Chinese society—corporal punishment is a common tool used by parents or teachers to discipline their children or students, something that Mao Zedong, a young man, was painfully aware of. This time, however, there was a rare event in human history: the transfer of the rod of violence from the hands of the educator to the educated. If we go back to roots, the use of violence is related to Mao Zedong’s definition of the nature of revolution. During the Cultural Revolution, “Sixteen articles” and many other central documents reiterated the classic definition of Mao Zedong’s 1927 report on the investigation of the peasant movement in Hunan province: A revolution is not a dinner party, an essay, or a painting or embroidery, so it cannot be so elegant, so unhurried, so gentle, so courteous, or so modest. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. (Mao, 1967: 17) In terms of direct motivation, this has something to do with Mao Zedong’s support for the rebellion of the little Red Guards at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution: When the aforementioned Song Binbin put the armband on Mao Zedong, the leader asked, “What’s your name?” Song replied, “Song Binbin.” The leader asked again, “How do you write your name?” Song answered, “The ‘binbin’ from the idiom wenzhi binbin (meaning gentle and courteous).” The leader told her, “This name is not good. We want violence rather than courtesy.” So she was renamed “Song Yaowu” (meaning love of violence) (Song, 1966). The Affiliated High School of Beijing Normal University for Women was also renamed “Yaowu High School”. Since then, the name “Song Yaowu” has become a symbol of violence by the red guards, inciting countless beatings across the country. In fact, as mentioned earlier, Bian Zhongyun, vice principal of Song Binbin’s school, died of violence two weeks before the great leader’s meeting. The main reason why we will discuss “blood theory” next is that “blood line” is the direct manifestation of intergenerational succession. However, the blood theory in the period of the Cultural Revolution is not only a relic of the patriarchal system,

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but also a direct expression of the class struggle theory of the Mao Zedong era. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the earliest Red Guards were basically all children of revolutionary cadres.12 The reason why they dared to take the lead in the rebellion is not only related to their holding Mao Zedong’s “imperial sword”, but also to the status and qualifications of their parents. Therefore, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the first group of Red Guards believed in the basic creed of blood theory—“Parents are heroes and children must be heroes. If parents are reactionary, their children must be bastards” (Song, 2006: 109). The Red Guards at the Tsinghua High School even wrote an article stating, “If the parents take power, their children inherit it. It’s called passing down from generation to generation” (Yin, 1993: 325). Naturally, the old Red Guards’ views of blood theory were savaged by the rebels from the ordinary class. In January 1967, the Cultural Revolution Newspaper of Beijing Middle School published “The theory of origin” written by Yu Luoke, a young worker, which sharply criticized blood theory (Yu, 1999). Yu Luoke’s article inspired a large number of teenagers who were ostracized or even bullied by blood theory, including students from the “black five” and “monster and snake” families, to join the rebel group. Obviously, in that time, the power of rebellion and revolution was greatest, and the power of equal rebellion and revolution was the best embodiment of political equality. However, shortly thereafter, Qi Benyu, a member of the Central Cultural Revolution Committee declared publicly: “‘The theory of origin’ is a poisonous weed, which maliciously distorts the Party’s class line and incites young people of poor birth to attack the party.” This led to Yu Luoke’s death. The irony of history is that the old Red Guards, the first to rebel, soon found that, although Yu Luoke was subdued, they too began to struggle against their parents, and not just their teachers. Countless children of cadres were then asked to stand firm with the proletariat and “draw a clear line” with their parents. In fact, as early as the “four clean-ups movement” in 1964, Mao Zedong deftly transformed the struggle against his political opponents in the Party into a class struggle (Huang, 1998). This time, practice made perfect. It is clear that Mao Zedong’s real purpose did not concern the likes of Bian Zhongyun, but his Party rivals, like Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. When the old Red Guards realized the true intention of the Great Commander, and spontaneously organized to defend the social order which was first disturbed by them, and then instinctively defended their parents’ status and even their lives which had been attacked more and more frequently, they naturally went over to the side opposing the Great Commander. Soon, as Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Tao Zhu, and tens of thousands of the “capitalist establishment” across the country suffered the collapse of the Cultural Revolution, the “Xicheng district Red Guard picket team” and the “Capital Red Guard joint action committee” formed by the old Red Guards trying to turn the tide also began to taste the iron fist of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. Thus the pendulum had gone too far, and swung back inexorably. We have seen that although the Cultural Revolution and the uprising of the Red Guards not only

62 Intergenerational relations impacted the political and social order of Chinese society, but also completely upended the relationship between the old and the young, between the educator and the educated, between leaders and subordinates, we can see that there is a big difference between this rebellion and the Western student movement of 1968, which we described in Chapter 1. The rebellion in Europe and America in 1968 originated from the reflection and dissatisfaction of young students toward Western values and their social system, or from their identification crisis concerning the capitalist system, whereas the Red Guard movement of 1966 was a political tool built by the Great Commander to eliminate dissent and realize his utopian beliefs. But apart from a wholesale change of leadership, it had changed nothing, not even the passive and subordinate position of youth in the overall social structure. Although Chen Xiaolu once confidently declared that “it is the child who educates his mothers in the present and future”, he and his like gave their elders, apart from belts and iron fists, nothing more than the principles of the idealism and violence of the Cultural Revolution (though their parents had already come through a hail of bullets and were no strangers to this). The political or private life of those inside the Party, or of a leader, was revealed during the Cultural Revolution. In our interview, NFF, who was in high school at the time of the Cultural Revolution, recalls that when it began in 1966 it was indeed a special time for his relationship with his father. At that time, the streets were plastered with large posters reflecting the trend of the Cultural Revolution and the inside stories of all kinds of defeated people. His father, a principal of a suburban high school in Nanjing, was afraid to go to the city to read the Dazibao or big-character posters because of a series of political movements, such as the “anti-right” movement in 1957, so he often asked NFF about the content of the Dazibao or big-character posters and the specific progress of the Cultural Revolution. Other than that, the Revolution, directed by the great general and involving the younger generation, had no cultural innovations to speak of. Of course, this does not mean that we should forget about the Cultural Revolution. Its research value lies not only in how to prevent the history of madness from repeating itself in China, but also for sociologists to explore how the national policies at that time directly intruded into the family life of people, including the parent–child relationship. In this regard, Zhou Xuegang and Hou Liren’s research reveals “the intrusion and reconstruction of individual life course caused by changes of national policies and national policies” (Zhou & Hou, 1999: 31).

Up to the mountains and down to the villages: the offbeat education of knowledgeable youths In terms of the intrusion and reconstruction of the individual life course and family life by the state, the ensuing move by young intellectuals into the countryside was nothing less than a rapid Red Guard movement. The reason for this is that, although the great youth rebellion completely disrupted the social order in China in the 1960s, including the subversion of intergenerational relations, the truly arbitrary Red Guard movement lasted only two years. After October 1968, although the workers stationed in schools and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)’s propaganda team of Mao

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Zedong’s thought began to rebuild the Red Guards, at this time the latter were limited to middle schools and were placed under the leadership of the Workers’ Corps, the Military Corps, the Revolutionary Association, or the Communist Youth League organizations that gradually began to resume their tasks. Later, the Red Guards became a peripheral organization of the Communist Youth League. Not until 1978 did the Tenth National Congress of the Communist Youth League officially decide to disband the Red Guards (Yin, 1993: 310–311). Most of the generation of Red Guards who took part in the 1966 uprising began their decade-long journey to the countryside after Mao Zedong officially sent out a team of publicity workers in July 1968. In fact, the history of going into the countryside can be traced back to 1955–1956 when, under the organization of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League and the Beijing Youth League Committee, three groups of urban and rural youths from Beijing went to Heilongjiang province to reclaim waste land. In 1956, in “The national outline for agricultural development in 1956–1967 (draft)”, it was put forward that the best way to solve urban unemployment was to go to the suburbs, to the countryside, to land reclamation areas, or to mountainous areas (Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, 1956). The following year, the phrase “going to the countryside and going to the mountains” appeared in draft amendments to the outline (Du, 1993: 17, 11). After the 1960s, due to the failure of China’s industrial Great Leap Forward, “going to the countryside” began to be promoted as a means to reduce the urban population and relieve the pressure of employment. According to statistics, by the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, a total of 1.2–1.3 million urban youth had settled in rural areas (Bernstein, 1993: 24; Deng, 2009: 13). A few of these were recommended by the economic and social teams to go to university (such as the writer Feng Jicai) or into the factory, but most returned to the cities during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, or stayed in the countryside and became real peasants. By the summer of 1968, the Cultural Revolution had been going on for two years, and the junior and senior high school students of 1966, 1967 and 1968 (commonly known as laosanjie, the “old three-grade students”) were piled up in high school because of the cultural revolution. In 1968, there was a unique phenomenon of middle school students of six years, a total of nearly 10 million people, graduating in the same year, which caused a huge employment crisis (Zhou, 1999: 90). They were a political bargaining chip to be used before they defeated the bourgeois establishment led by Liu Shaoqi, though by then the Red Guards, idle and cynical in the city, were beginning to be a sore point with the Great Commander. At this time, 191 urban residents of Huining county, Gansu province, settled down into 13 people’s communes from July to December, 1968, and proposed that “we also have two hands, and should not lead an idle life in the city”. Clear-eyed Mao Zedong took advantage of the situation, and on December 22 the People’s Daily published a report with the following editorial: Chairman Mao recently taught us again that it is necessary for young intellectuals to go to the countryside and receive re-education from the poor

64 Intergenerational relations and middle peasants. We should mobilize urban cadres and other people to send their children who have graduated from junior high schools, high schools and universities to the countryside. Comrades in rural areas everywhere should welcome them. Mao Zedong’s instructions began a decade-long campaign to go into the countryside, which reached an unprecedented climax. As far as the Communist Party and its Great Commander were concerned, in the course of decades of revolutionary struggle, social mobilization techniques had long been perfected. In 1949, millions of young peasants were successfully mobilized to participate in the struggle to bury the Chiang dynasty and land reform (Zhou, 1956; Ding, 2006); in 1953, land that had just been allocated to hundreds of millions of farmers was successfully reclaimed (Zhou, 2005); in 1958, hundreds of millions of people were successfully involved in the Great Leap Forward (Li, 1996); in 1966, numerous young Red Guards were successfully mobilized to oppose the bourgeoisie; and this time, tens of millions of unemployed intellectual youth were to be successfully mobilized into the great flood of going into the countryside. According to path dependence theories, the social mobilization tactics of the movement of intellectual youth going into the countryside were not fundamentally different from other political movements. First, propaganda. Different from previously, this emphasized the ideological importance of going into the countryside and the mountains to mix with workers and peasants, or to accept the re-education of the poor and middle peasants, which was a major strategy to train the successors of the proletariat and mark a watershed between revolution and counter-revolution. Second, role models needed to be set up. From the early Xing Yan, Dong Jiageng, and Hou Jun, to the later Jin Xunhua and Zhou Bingjian (Zhou Enlai’s niece), these role models, full of revolutionary idealism, kept emerging in the great movement to the countryside, so that people did not doubt Lenin’s famous saying “The power of example is infinite”. Third, policy initiatives. Even in an age of “politics first”, interests were still the best drive; therefore policy dictated that if someone in the family went into the countryside, some other family members could stay in the city and get a job. Going to college or joining the army—the best upward mobility opportunity of that time— was also conditional on having spent more than two years in the countryside. Fourth, setting the target. Each province, each city, each county had not only set the number of people to go into the countryside, but had also set the number of people to be accepted by each specific rural village, so as to ease the resistance of farmers due to the large number of people and the restricted amount of land, as well as the fear of such intellectual youth arriving and “grabbing their rations”. Finally, there were the round-the-clock “home visits” and “heart-to-heart” conversations with those “backward elements”, or the inviting of them to participate in the widespread “Mao Zedong thoughts study classes” (Berstein, 1993: 113). The practice of mobilizing poor peasants to join the army to “defend the fruits of the land reform” in the north-eastern town of Yuanmaotun worked just as well here.

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The effect of social mobilization was remarkable and was the most prominent manifestation of the ruling ability of the Communist Party of China during the Mao Zedong era, and going into the countryside was no exception. Except for a few young men whose parents were still in important positions who joined the army, most of the other young men, including children of such overthrown cadres as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, went to the countryside. In the ten years from 1968 to 1978, from the great Hinggan Mountains to the Loess Plateau, from the lower reaches of the Yangtze River to Xishuangbanna, China’s 9.6 million square kilometers of land was full of more than 12 million intellectual youth who had gone into the countryside.13 These young people, who a few years ago had been “having fun fighting people”, now faced direct challenges from the harsh natural and cultural environment. Over a period of more than ten years, more than 12 million intellectual youth were thrown from the top of the turbulent revolutionary wave to the bottom of society and contributed to something called “revolutionary ideal”. Under the slogan of “Work hard, work skillfully, and work desperately”, the educated youth work hard and desperately in the ice and snow of northeast China and Inner Mongolia, in the vast desert in Xinjiang, in the continuous mountains in Yunnan, and in rural areas in Dazhai. A thin, nutrient-poor body does superhuman hard work. Every educated youth can recall the desperate labor of those days. (Fei, 1993a: 140) In fact, pure labor at that time was only a means to transform the nonproletarian world view. As early as in the War of Resistance against Japanese aggression, Mao Zedong stipulated the course of life for young intellectuals: “They must be integrated with the broad masses of workers and peasants”, which also demarcated whether they were for revolution, non-revolution, or counter-revolution (Mao, 1967: 530, 523). Even then, however, Mao Zedong advocated the “integration” of young intellectuals with the masses of workers and peasants, with the purpose to mobilize and organize “the masses of workers and peasants, who make up 90 percent of the national population” (Mao, 1967: 529). However, in 1949, and especially after 1968, Mao Zedong began to advocate the “re-education” of educated youth by poor and middle peasants, perhaps out of distrust of intellectuals or dissatisfaction with the 17-year-old education system. Mobilizers and organizers were to turn into educators, from which we can clearly see the change of the social role of the young generation of intellectuals. In 1968, in response to the call of the Great Leader, Zhang Xincan, a “revolutionary girl” who went to Lishu county, Jilin province to join the queue, wrote a paragraph in her diary of that year, which not only reflects the social reality of that time, but also represents a true portrayal of the intergenerational relationship between the educated youth and the poor and middle peasants who regarded the old as the basis of their dignity:14

66 Intergenerational relations I will regard myself as an ordinary laborer, forever a pupil of the poor and middle peasants. The class struggle in rural areas is also very complicated. I must stand firmly with the proletariat, stand on the side of the poor and middle peasants, conscientiously obey their correct leadership and that of their cadres, do good deeds for them more often, eat, live and work with them, regard them as my parents, and always be their good descendants. I will thoroughly criticize the old ideas of the exploiting classes, such as “Studying to become an official”, “All except reading is inferior”, and “He who uses his mind rules; he who uses his labor is ruled”, and make good plans to stay rooted in the countryside for a lifetime, visit the family history and village history of the poor and old middle peasants, often recall their painful memories, and receive the re-education of the poor and old middle peasants. (Zhang, 2003: 257) At the same time that the educated youth went into the countryside to receive “re-education” from the poor and old middle peasants, another form of reeducation was gradually carried out in formal primary schools, middle schools, and even universities, whose main purpose was to train the “successors of the proletariat” or the “new communists”. In order to cultivate the new communists, during the ten-year “educational revolution”, which was basically synchronized with the Cultural Revolution, a variety of novel and even absurd “new things” kept emerging. In order to end the rule of bourgeois intellectuals over schools, in addition to sending large numbers of workers’ propaganda teams, army propaganda teams, and peasant propaganda teams to universities and middle schools, lecturers composed of workers, peasants, or soldiers of the PLA were also sent to teach students a variety of subjects, including science and technology and foreign languages, in addition to politics, although these “innovations” produced a lot of funny jokes (Reporting Group of Wuxi Revolutionary Committee, 1974).15 Factories, schools, and associations were linked to set up various bases for “learning agriculture” and “learning industry”. Students were not only allowed to go to factories or people’s communes regularly to participate in industrial or agricultural labor, but also to combine teaching courses with productive labor—even physics classes in middle schools were called a “Basic Industry Course”, and chemistry classes were called a “Basic Agriculture Course”.16 The school system was compressed, the examination system was abolished, or reformed—into open-book examination or open-door examination (i.e., the first line of practice was to be in factories or rural areas, combining questions tested in practice). In teaching, science and engineering were “combined with typical product teaching”, and liberal arts were “combined with combat mission”. In accordance with Mao Zedong’s instructions on different contents of the educational revolution and the time when the instructions were published, “July 21st universities” which recruited students from the staff of their own units or systems who returned to the workshops after graduation were established in cities; and “May 7th Schools” corresponding to these universities were established in counties, communities, teams, or farms in rural areas. In those days, the most

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dazzling “new thing” was nothing more than those workers, peasants, and soldiers entering universities through the recommendation system. In 1970, four and a half years after colleges and universities stopped enlisting, they began to recruit students from workers, peasants, and soldiers who had more than three years of practical work experience and more than a junior middle school education, in accordance with Mao Zedong’s instructions. The procedure for recruiting students was: recommendation by the masses, leadership approval, and school re-examination. From then until 1976, the Communist Party of China recruited 940,000 college students from the industrial, agricultural, and military areas, accounting for 21.4% of the total number of college graduates after 1949. The prevalence of the recommendation system not only left ample room for back-room manipulation, but also led to an extremely low level of students. After 1973, in order to make up for the lost cause, the State Council approved the decision of increasing the cultural examination of college enrollment put forward by the relevant departments. In this context, Liaoning province produced Zhang Tiesheng, the “hero of the white scroll”. In an effort to quell disdain for the likes of Zhang Tiesheng, the Shenyang Medical College in Liaoning province first conducted a surprise exam of professors to prove that “Mr. Zhang’s blank examination paper is understandable”. In the years that followed, the practice of giving tests to professors became very popular. At the mobilization meeting of disapproving Lin Biao and Confucius in 1974, Jiang Qing praised and said, “This testing professor practice started from the northeast, that is, from Zhang Tiesheng.” The examination of professors in Beijing was organized by the education and science group of the state council and the Beijing education and science group. On the morning of December 30, 1973, a conference was held to plan the test and then an examination paper was issued in Tsinghua University. The examination questions for Maths, Physics and Chemistry were selected from the academic examination papers of college enrollment in that year, without any examination questions of liberal arts. When the paper was printed, it was already five o’clock in the afternoon. They then dispatched 20 vehicles to 17 colleges and universities to carry out “surprise attacks”. When notifying the professors, they pretended to have them come for a symposium, so the professors seriously took their notebooks to attend the meeting, which turned out to be a prank. Examiners said, “Today is a ‘surprise attack’ to give you an exam. Don’t you look down on students and often use this method to trick them?” Some old professors, such as Bai Shouyi, a history professor at Beijing Normal University, immediately refused to answer and left. Some others wrote their objections on paper. … As a result, there were 613 full and associate professors who took part in the exam in Beijing, 53 of whom passed the exam, 360 of whom failed, and 200 of them refused to answer questions and handed in the blank paper, with an average score of 20. Among them, 6 professors from one school got a total score of 6, 1 per capita. Therefore, those who support “white-rolled heroes” confidently asserted that academic examination “could not test a person’s real

68 Intergenerational relations political level and professional ability”, and that “such examination of workers, peasants and soldiers was only to create difficulties and hinder them from going to college”. (Fang, 1974; Zhou, 1999: 273) The inversion of the teacher–student relationship, the inversion of the relationship between educators and the educated, and the deprivation of the educational rights of tens of millions of young people, not only made the Cultural Revolution a cultural catastrophe in a practical sense, but also foreshadowed the subversion of the intergenerational relationship from 1978 to today. In the above-mentioned large-scale sampling study conducted by Zhou Xueguang and Hou Liren involving 6 provinces and 20 cities, the average time for intellectual youth to stay in rural areas is 6 years, of whom 19.3% stay for over 10 years, 39.3% for 5–10 years, and 41.4% for 5 years or less. The subsequent descriptive statistics found that among the three types of urban youth groups who later received higher education, the proportion of young people who did not go into the countryside was the lowest (8.4%), the proportion of those who stayed in the countryside for less than 6 years have the highest proportion (14.2%), while the proportion of those who stayed in the countryside for more than 6 years was in between (only 9.5%). The researchers suggest that the reason the group of educated youth who stayed in the countryside for less than 6 years has the highest proportion of college students may be related to the fact that their difficult life experiences motivated them to re-establish their social position through education, but the resumption of the university entrance exam in 1977 came too late for those who had spent more than 6 years in the countryside. (Zhou & Hou, 1999: 26–27) Indeed, too long a period of wind, rain, and hard work has destroyed their life aspirations and hollowed out their spiritual world. Our generation was delayed. During the cultural revolution, we suspended classes and went to the countryside. When we left for the countryside, some female classmates even knew nothing about menstruation, and when they came back, they had become little old women. (Deng, 1993b: 355) In fact, the ten years of Cultural Revolution not only deprived tens of millions of young people of a formal education and to go to university, but also brought great harm to those people who stayed in the city for various reasons. In those years, the high school graduates who stayed in the cities were mostly assigned to small businesses in restaurants, vegetable farms, or street offices. I still remember that my middle-school classmate J. was assigned to the wire mesh factory run by the street management office. When he walked through the factory gate for the first time at

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the age of 18 with a beautiful dream in his life, he could not help shedding tears of despair when he saw the narrow yard full of middle-aged and elderly women sitting on the floor and weaving wire mesh by hand. Comparatively speaking, although life was more difficult in the vast countryside where we went to, we could make some achievements. Moreover, even if you were able to get into the best companies (such as electronics factories or department stores) through your parents’ connections, it was often impossible to avoid being laid off after the 1978 reforms due to market competition or industrial restructuring. In his book Children in the Great Depression, the American scholar G. H. Elder wanted to study the process of change by examining the impact of social change on individual life experience. He notes that “the individual’s life course is embedded in and shaped by historical time and the events they experience in their life years” (Elder, 2002: 426). This shaping can be both positive and negative. We admit that we also see the positive shaping of those participants by the Cultural Revolution and later going into the countryside. Some of this group—mainly those who went to university after 1977—became famous writers, artists, professors, or leaders and managers in government departments and industrial organizations. After the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Xi Jinping, Li Keqiang, and others, also from the educated youth group, even became the main leaders of the Party and the country. As Zhou Xuegang and Hou Liren state, “Intellectual youth have contributed to China’s economic transformation through various important channels” (Zhou & Hou, 1999: 33). However, it should be noted that only a tiny fraction of that population is successful, while for most of today’s parents, aged 50–65, the years are long gone and success has become an unattainable dream in their lifetime, leaving them with more negative memories. By contrast, their children, who have benefited from nearly 42 years of reform and opening-up in China, have mostly received higher education that is far better than their parents’, and are therefore competitive in the labor market and at every stage of life. We shall soon see how these lucky young generations become the life mentors of their parents, and how a subversive revolution has taken place between the two generations in China, involving values, life attitudes, behavior patterns, and culture objects.

Notes 1 To this end, Kong Guoan once commented, “He is virtuous, kind and respectful to his parents; those who are good to parents must be kind to brothers and friends and be able to execute political orders” (Gu, 1982: 21). 2 The “four books” include The Analects of Confucius, The Doctrine of the Mean, Mencius, and The Great Learning, while the “five classics” include The Book of Songs, The Classic of History, The Book of Changes, The Book of Rites, and The Spring and Autumn Annals, which are regarded as “the original classics of traditional culture that propagandize moral principles and ethics” (Zhang, 2005: 44). 3 The concept was first used by the American sociologist William Ogburn in his book Social Change to refer to the incongruity that occurs during the process of social change due to the difference in the rate of change between different parts of a culture (Ogburn, 1950: 200). For example, immaterial culture often lags behind the change of

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4

5

6

7

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material culture. Here, we use it to refer to the inversion difference in the rate of adjustment between parents and children in the face of the same social changes. There are two very similar old stories that can show the spirit of the young intellectuals of that era. One is when Chen Duxiu and Wu Yue vied to assassinate the five Manchu ministers. Wu Yue asked, “Which is easier, to throw away life or to carve out a career?” Chen Duxiu replied, “The former is naturally easier than the latter.” “That’s it, so I’ll do the easy one and leave you with the hard one,” Wu said. Wu Yue immediately went north to assassinate the five ministers, and died at the age of 27. The other story is that, in his youth, Wang Ching-wei wrote in the article “Determination for revolution”, published in the 26th issue of the People’s Daily: “Four hundred million people are now waiting, like children, for the food of revolution. But you need wood and a pot to cook the rice. The wood, by burning itself to ashes, transfers the heat generated to the rice to make it mature, while the pot silently endures hot water and fire. So the role of the revolutionaries is twofold: one is as firewood. People who act as firewood need dedication of perseverance, willing to turn themselves into ashes to cook into the rice of the revolution; the other is as the pot. People who act as the pot need tenacious endurance, willing to suffer to cook the revolutionary rice.” In 1909, when Wang Ching-wei went north to assassinate the senior officials of the Qing dynasty, he said to Hu Hanmin, who was trying to dissuade him, “As I have said before in the ‘Determination for revolution’, the revolutionaries must be willing to serve as firewood and pot for the revolution. Now I am needed as firewood for the revolution, and if I cherish my own life, how can the rice be made?” This is indeed a great righteousness. A total of 317 people were surveyed in Pan’s study, 86% of whom were under the age of 30. Most respondents were from academic circles, including students. There were 116 students with college education and 158 students with middle school education, accounting for 86.4% of the total number of 274 students (Pan, 1993: 87–93). Throughout his life, Pan Guangdan stressed the importance of good birth and good breeding as a means of ethnic prosperity and continuity. He was always opposed to the individualistic family and marriage views advocated by the intellectuals at that time, represented by Shen Fu’s Six Records of a Floating Life, and therefore was regarded as conservative by many people. To this end, in the book Introduction to Healthy Birth, Pan Guangdan explained, “My fundamental attitude towards the old systems, such as ‘no offspring is the great unfilial’, ‘a woman without talent is virtuous’, ‘marriage is decided by the parents’, ‘imperial examination’ and so on, was nothing more than ‘understanding’ and ‘permission’. These systems, from the standpoint of ethnic hygiene, seem not to be without considerable value; one of the purposes of my article is to point out this value, regardless of how much it is, and to ask those who attack them to show mercy, rather than to encourage them intentionally and without conditions” (Pan, 1993: 289–290). The first sentence was quoted from Mao Zedong’s letter to Jiang Qing on July 8, 1966, and the second from Mao Zedong’s self-revised “Notice of the central committee of the Communist Party of China” (also known as the “May 16 notice”), adopted on May 16, 1966, which is also regarded as the beginning of the Cultural Revolution (Wang, 1988: 6, 13). Li Nanyang’s father was Li Rui, a well-known Party intellectual and liberal, who was Mao Zedong’s secretary and vice minister of the organization department of the CPC central committee. Lao Gui’s mother was Yang Mo, the author of Song of Youth, which is known as a “red literary classic”. In Feng Xiaotian’s research on families with only children, it is found that parents of single-child families pay over 20% more than parents of multi-child families in terms of tutoring children’s homework or playing games with them (Feng & Zhang, 2004: 97–98). According to the study of children’s food by Jing Jun, “by measuring

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13

14 15

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living standards, children are far ahead of their parents’ childhood” (Jing, 2000: 1); the book was simply titled Feed China’s Little Emperors. The date here is based on the memory of Luo Xiaohai, one of the organizers, and the diary of Song Bolin, another organizer, who recorded the date of the event as June 3 (see Song, 2006: 19, 75). The three posters were later published on August 21 in the 11th issue of Red Flag magazine, a publication of the CPC central committee. Chen Xiaolu we might mentioned here, for example, was the son of Chen Yi; Song Binbin was the daughter of Song Renqiong; Song Weishi, Song Bailin’s father, was the vice president of the PLA Institute of Politics; Wang Ming’s father, Wang Zhongfang, was secretary general of Qinghai Provincial Party Committee. In his book Going to the Countryside, Thomas Bernstein calculated that 12 million young intellectuals went to the countryside after 1968, based on statistics from different provinces during the Cultural Revolution (Bernstein, 1993: 24). This figure was basically the same as that reported in the 19th issue of the Beijing Review on January 9, 1976 (the report’s title was just “Twelve million middle school graduates have settled down in rural areas”). Du Honglin, author of Waves and Falls—A History of Chinese Intellectuals Going to the Countryside (1955–1979), put the number at 17 million. On the title page of his book, he wrote: “I dedicate this book to the 17 million educated youth” (Du, 1993). In his book Hot Blood and Cold Tears: The Movement of Educated Youth in China in Retrospect of the Century, Fei Sheng also proposed that in the ten years from 1968 to 1978, the number of educated youth in the countryside reached 17 million (Fei, 1993a: 73). At that time, the most authoritative people were the old poor peasants and the old Party members, so I think there is still a clear intergenerational inheritance path between the poor and old middle peasants and the educated young people. In fact, such attempts began as early as 1958. For example, in the Great Leap Forward of 1958, many workers and peasant Party members were selected to serve as “workers and peasants principals” in rural schools previously dominated by “rightists” (see Zhou, 2000b). In this regard, I would like to thank my middle school teacher, Mr. Long Chuanxian, who graduated from the physics department of Central University in his early years. In order to meet the needs of the educational revolution at that time, and at the same time prevent us middle school students from neglecting our studies, he also invented the initiative of “studying medicine” in the military health corps. This was probably one of the reasons why I applied to Nanjing Medical College when its entrance examination was resumed in 1977. In fact, at that time, the above practice of “inviting in” and “going out” constituted the main connotation of “opening schools” in the early 1970s (Zhou, 1999a: 149).

3

Revolution in the depths of the soul

Most accounts give greatest priority to the role played by the values, norms and beliefs of people in determining the sort of society—traditional or modern—that they create, and thus value changes are the most important conditions for social change. Andrew Webster

The age of controversy and progress In 2008, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of China’s reform and opening-up, the Southern People Weekly, one of the leading newspapers in China, published several columns with the theme of “30 years’ review and prospect”. In the 12th issue, published on April 21, the Southern People Weekly introduced 15 controversial people from the past 30 years, including He Xin, Ke Yunlu, He Zhili, Mu Zimei, Li Yinhe, Qiu Xinglong, and Chen Guang, linked by the common theme of concept change. In the “editor’s note” written by journalist He Sanwei, these 30 years, in addition to the obvious growth of GDP, are still an “incremental” era of values, an era of controversy and progress: The most fascinating thing about this age is the range of ideas it stirs: Capitalist and socialist, left and right, “neo-left” and “neo-right”, radical and gradual, fairness and efficiency, authority and populism, culture and tradition, freedom and democracy, universality and national conditions … If we follow such clues, we can really say that this is a “controversial era”. Controversy can be a booster of progress. But controversies do not necessarily solve problems, nor do they necessarily lead to progress, or to popular expectations; it is entirely possible that controversy lingers on common sense and stops at controversy There are people who have contributed real wisdom to the times. Their thoughts, actions and ideas have promoted social changes and renewed ideas. Some have provided the issue of the age with their fate, they have borne its misfortunes, or enjoyed its glories. (He, 2008: 22) DOI: 10.4324/9780429447679-3

Revolution in the depths of the soul 73 In these 30 years of earth-shaking changes, how can there be only 15 people who held controversial ideas? For example, He Xin, a self-taught scholar, stirred controversy with a self-serving theory that justifies authoritarianism and realistic rationality: “Is his system of discourse honest academic inquiry or political speculation?” And before and after He Xin became famous, there were thinkers who were equally and even more controversial: Hu Fuming, a philosophy lecturer at Nanjing University in his early 40s, published his essay “Practice is the only criterion for testing truth” in the Guangming Daily on May 11, 1978, posing a sharp challenge to the “two whatevers” doctrine that dominated Chinese politics at the time, sparking massive controversy and prompting what has been called “one of the greatest ideological liberation movements in contemporary China” (Ma & Ling, 1998: 67). In the leaden political atmosphere following the Tiananmen Square political turmoil of 1989, amid a resurgence of “leftists” who urged people to always ask whether it is capitalist or socialist no matter what happens, Huangfu Ping wrote four essays, including “Leading the reform and opening-up”, published in the Shanghai Jiefang Daily at the beginning of 1991, in response to those attacks and criticisms on reform and opening-up. Here it was declared that “history and reality have repeatedly proved that ‘the only solution to our troubles is reform’”, which thus suffered from the same political pressure.1 Ke Yunlu, who rose to literary fame with his revolutionary novel New Star, sparked controversy by publishing a long report “The discovery of the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon” in support of the quack Hu Wanlin. Over these 30 years, there were also a large number of writers who caused controversy simply because of their ideas or opinions. Bai Hua, based on the life of the painter Huang Yongyu, wrote the film script Bitter Love in 1980, when the political climate was still somewhat chilly. Although the characters still remain loyal to their motherland after having suffered all kinds of political hardships, Bai Hua bravely proclaimed the controversial and still unpardoned utterance of the protagonist’s daughter, “You love this country, you love it dearly, but does it love you?” Xu Jingya, a writer whose most important identity today is that of the husband of poet Wang Xiaoni, was famous in 1983 for his poem “Rising poems”, which aroused wide controversy (Xu, 1983). The controversy that cost him his job at the time and his rush to the south was simply a bold and excessive repudiation of traditional poetic theory. Equally bold but luckier is Han Han, a writer born in the 1980s who couldn’t finish high school. Since publishing his novel Triple Door in 2000 at the age of 18, he has been attracting attention with his maverick ways, cynical rhetoric, and, more recently, his increasingly sophisticated track and rally motor-racing skills—a controversy that has been dubbed the “Han Han phenomenon”. In the economic field, the most rapidly changing part of China in the past 42 years, the controversy caused by the active promotion of a market economy has never abated. Among the pioneers in this field are Ma Hong, Xue Muqiao, and Wu Jinglian, who advocated market reforms in an era when the planned economy was overwhelming, and who eventually won applause despite the pressures. Young people are certainly more commonly met with: from Song Longxiang, the “perpetrator” of the “Ma Ding incident”;2 Hu Sheng and He Jiacheng, the advocates of the

74 Revolution in the depths of the soul price dual-track system who “sow dragon seeds, but harvest fleas”; to Zhang Weiying, who outspokenly mentioned the “five impossibilities of state-owned enterprises”.3 After the 1990s, economists, the darlings of the market, replaced writers as icons of the mass society, and one after another, the ideological controversies they generated became landmarks for our time. If you set aside abstract values and ideologies, the debate over the transformation of ideas associated with concrete actions in the 30 years that have changed the destiny of the Chinese nation is endless. He Zhili, the former female table tennis player who won the world championship in 1987 but became the target of public criticism because she refused to “let the ball” according to the opinion of the leadership of the National Sports Administration, was criticized again by the Chinese seven years later for playing for Japan, shouting “yoshi” every time she won a point, and speaking only Japanese in interviews. In fact, even today, when China is so economically and socially connected or globalized, 1.3 billion Chinese still argue about someone’s alienation from (let alone betrayal of) their homeland. Thus, the controversy caused by the naturalization of martial arts star Jet Li in Singapore in 2009, and most of the Chinese stars who joined the film Founding Ceremony and who held foreign passports, naturally ranked among the most important cultural events of the year. Mu Zimei, a philosophy graduate born in the 1970s, is known for her body appeal. With such outrageous remarks as “I’ll give you as long as you can stay in my bed”, she made her way onto the home page of the history of the change of the Chinese people’s concept of sex over the past 30 years. My colleague Li Yinhe is perhaps more controversial than Mu Zimei. This follower of Foucault’s thought, in her own unique way, completely uncovered “the vast obscure area between the law and the forbidden, the social moral advocacy and prohibition”, and the psychological folds of “surprise” caused by that moment would have to be smoothed out for another 30 years. Whether it is the controversy over Mu Zimei’s actions or that over Li Yinhe’s theories, these problems were neither the first nor the last. Chi Zhiqiang, a film star who at the time performed “face dance” and had sex with two or three young women, paid a heavy price during the national campaign to “crack down on criminal activities” in 1983. Over a decade later, taking the punishment of Chi Zhiqiang and others as the “advance payment”, Wei Hui and Mian Mian showed their “body writing” in unprecedented relief. They openly claimed that “sex is our hospital, sex is a creative idea about love, sex is the background, and sex is our village” (Mian, 2004: 129). And Sister Lotus also drew attention from the same group of people by showing off her “S” shaped body, with the help of the network to create a favorite alternative myth. To be sure, these “pioneers”, together with the free-thinker Wang Xiaobo, who understood the absurdity of the Cultural Revolution and said “I walk in silence, walk in the sky, and a penis hangs upside down from above”, are probably the total initiators of the liberation of sexual ideas in China over the past 42 years.4

Revolution in the depths of the soul 75 Qiu Xinglong, a doctor of law who once shared prison time with 96 people sentenced to death, has been calling for an immediate abolition of the death penalty for a decade. In 2003, Dr. Yu Jiang, Dr. Xu Zhiyong, and Dr. Teng Biao wrote a letter to the National People’s Congress about the “Sun Zhigang incident”, which led to the abolition of the “asylum law” in just one month, although the relevant controversy still lingers today. Chen Guang, an official who became mayor of Zhucheng, Shandong province, in 1991 at the age of 35, sparked widespread controversy with his aggressive reform of state-owned enterprises into shareholding systems. Indeed, in the 42 years of China’s reform and opening-up, before and after Chen Guang, such far-sighted officials are not uncommon. In the 1980s, the market reform in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province and Quanzhou, Fujian province, especially the development of private economy, could not be separated from the two then Party secretaries Dong Chaocai and Zhang Mingjun, who were willing to take their own ideological risks to create a “paradise” for the free development of private enterprises. In the 1990s, Li Youwei, the Party secretary of Shenzhen who repeatedly caused controversy and was not afraid of it, wrote “Reflections on ownership” based on his study at the school of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and on Shenzhen’s reform practice. The criticism from the “leftists” triggered by it is widely recognized as “the severest political criticism of a leading cadre since the end of the cultural revolution” (Ma & Ling, 1998: 358). Let us recall the names of those elders who were ahead of their time during the 30 years of changing attitudes: Bai Hua, Ma Hong, Xue Muqiao, Wu Jinglian, Yuan Geng, Li Youwei, and, of course, Hu Yaobang, Wan Li, and the chief designer Deng Xiaoping. We will not ignore their leadership and their persistence, dedication, and sacrifice to the troubled nation, but we may notice that it was the “young China” or “new youth” that Liang Qichao and Chen Duxiu focused on at the beginning of the last century that really pushed the nation forward as a whole. Since 1978, or even earlier during the “April Fifth Movement”5 in 1976, a succession of young people, with the support of these wise elders, have broken all kinds of mental shackles formed since the planned economy era and even since the beginning of the Chinese nation 5,000 years ago. While constantly arousing controversy from different groups, they have affected older generations and promoted the revival of the nation and the progress of society. However, French social psychologist Jean Stoetzel argued that people of different ages had different opinions on change and the pace of the times. These different assessments were linked to each person’s thoughts on the cultural and social changes they had seen. Each person belonged to his or her own generation, which was bound to agree or disagree with the values that people held. Thus, the most important question with regard to the expression of wishes by persons of different ages was not to explain their general changes, but to indicate whether such wishes were compatible or incompatible with the direction of change (Stoetzel, 1988: 161). From the perspective of intergenerational relations, the argument by Stoetzel shows that controversy is an inevitable process accompanied by social changes, because the various changes in social life brought about by transformation put

76 Revolution in the depths of the soul different age groups in different historical periods, where their positions, interests, life ideals, and self-identities are accordingly placed, so they will naturally form values according to the standpoint of their age about the specific events that constitute social changes and even the changes themselves—the necessity of the difference or even opposition between two or more generations constitutes the inescapable nature of the dispute. Furthermore, the fact that controversy is the propeller of social progress not only indicates that attempts to break tradition have begun to appear in what was previously solid, but also indicates that a struggle for powerful discourse has occurred between the conservative older generation and the aggressive younger generation—the replacement of power caused by such competition is just one of the symbols of generational replacement in social life. Here, on the surface, discourse is the language spoken or written by people in daily life, but from a deeper level, discourse, as Foucault puts it, is a language and power system overlapping with social practice. Therefore, the formation of discourse is closely related to non-discourse fields (power, systems, political events, economic practices and processes) (Foucault, 1972: 49). In its hidden folds, discourse naturally contains a rich and broad social meaning beyond its surface meaning. Since discourse is a social relation or power relation, it naturally manifests the operation of power in social interaction, because one of the purposes of using language is to influence or dominate the behavior of others. In this sense, the discourse relations that reflect symbolic power first depend on the real power relations between the speaker and the listener. In the traditional intergenerational relationship, the older generation is in the dominant position of “speaker”, while the younger generation is more in the position of “listener”. Over the past 42 years, the populace has been presented with the “indoctrination” and “chatter” (one of the most important characteristics of chatter is its endless repetition) of traditional ideology from the older generation and especially from the social system as a whole. The younger generation tends to deconstruct the political power shown by the system of traditional discourse in its own way: from indifference and alienation, to protest and resistance. The following idea or choice of CMB, a 20-year-old male student of Chinese literature in the second year of the Southwest University in Chongqing, is no stranger to anyone who truly understands reality: I like to watch news, but I don’t watch serious TV news because I think a lot of it is filtered. Therefore, I watch Phoenix TV, surf the Internet to watch Sina news, Phoenix news, and sometimes China News Network news and the web pages of Li Shenzhi and others. I don’t agree with my mother. I don’t think there is anything that can’t be seen. My father is a history professor and my mother is the general secretary of the Physics Department. There is certainly a generation gap between them and me—if a person doesn’t have a generation gap with his parents, he will certainly have a generation gap with his peers, which is even more terrible. However, I have my own strategy for interacting with them, which is you say

Revolution in the depths of the soul 77 yours and I do mine. I don’t want to argue with them. After all, they are my parents and have been much tolerant to me. I know, if the family can’t tolerate you, the society will certainly not tolerate you. (CMB, 2004) There is no doubt that in the past 42 years of reform and opening-up, although the younger generation has constructed its own discourse system through an unrestrained spirit of innovation and a distinctive form of expression, and has always posed a dialogue and challenge to the system of mainstream discourse due to their weak position in the real power relations, the system of discourse of young people is still in a marginal position within the whole society, and is always in a passive and “criticized” state concerning controversy. As far as I am concerned, the discourse and knowledge system of the younger generation has not been contained or deconstructed during 42 years of disputes, has even exerted more influence on the values and lifestyles of the older generation, and has gradually penetrated into mainstream discourse and become a part of it. Not only is the progress of society constantly verifying the new ideas and demands put forward by the younger generation whose ideas have changed, but also the younger generation with these new ideas and demands gradually grow up and become the backbone of society or the backbone of value. More importantly, in the midst of countless controversies of one kind or another, the disadvantaged younger generation has been sheltered by permissive elders such as Deng Xiaoping. “Don’t argue, do practical work” was the unique way by which Deng Xiaoping sheltered the younger generation in the era of the great social changes in China. “Don’t argue”, in a way, deprives the older generation, who have the potential to dictate ideological disputes, of the right to criticize the younger generation. “Do practical work”, on the other hand, empowers the younger generation to try and act in a tolerant way. We have confirmed, and will further confirm, that in 42 years of reform and opening-up, Chinese society has achieved its own changes in this way, making this ancient country increasingly undergo the process of rejuvenation.

The collapse of faith and the confusion of Pan Xiao and others No one can deny that the large-scale conceptual change in Chinese society after 1978 began with Hu Fuming’s article “Practice is the only criterion for testing truth”. With the direct support of two wise elders, Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang, the newspapers published this article that was not only shocking at the time, but also sparked a half-year-long debate on the question of truth and initiated a larger ideological liberation movement. This discussion and the ideological liberation movement denied the “two whatevers” and the personality cult, thus breaking the thinking pattern of decades, namely that “the whole society of millions of people has only one head”. This not only laid the ideological foundation for the Third Plenary Session of the 11th CPC Central Committee held at the end of this year, but also paved the way for great changes in Chinese

78 Revolution in the depths of the soul values and social behavior patterns in the following decades, and provided an appropriate environment and soil for the rise of youth culture.6 Almost at the same time, in the great discussion of the question of truth and the tide of the ideological liberation movement, new changes arose to make things right in Chinese society. First of all, the “April 5th Tiananmen movement” in 1976 was vindicated, and the Copy of Tiananmen Poems, which expressed dissatisfaction with autocracy and doubts about the Cultural Revolution, was “retained in the memory of history as a spiritual monument after all” (Xie, 1995). Then, led by Hu Yaobang, a large-scale campaign to redress wrongful convictions was launched nationwide. More than 20 million cadres and people who had been mercilessly criticized and beaten after 1949, especially during the “ten years of disaster”, were rehabilitated one after another, which included a large number of presidents, marshals, vice-premiers, and ministers of the Republic, like Liu Shaoqi, Peng Dehuai, Peng Zhen, Tao Zhu, and He Long, and young thinkers and early skeptics like Zhang Zhixin, Yu Luoke, and Li Dongmin, as well as 550,000 “rightists” who were involved in political “propaganda” during the “anti-rightist struggle” in 1957. “The decision on brand removal of landlords and rich peasants and the social identity of their children”, adopted in 1979, removed the brands of millions of landlords and rich peasants in the rural areas of the country who began to be treated as members of the people’s communes. This political realization, nearly 30 years overdue, was a crucial step in transforming Chinese society from a stratified system centered on class origins to one centered on careers (Zhou, 2002).7 Behind these new changes, there began to appear the fracture of traditional values or the germination of concept change. In the words of Ba Jin, The eleven years of the cultural revolution was an extraordinary period. The struggle was sharp, complicated and brutal. Everybody had been involved, everybody had been tried, everything had been pushed to the top, so that people could see it clearly. Everyone was forced to think with his own head and not live by selling other people’s “conclusions” or “aphorisms” from elsewhere. (Ba, 2005: 64) Indeed, the real reason for the rupture of Chinese people’s values or the change of their ideas is the great historical tragedy of the Cultural Revolution, which lasted for ten years. This tragedy is different from the turmoil of modern Chinese society caused by imperialist aggression and intervention after 1840, because it made the Chinese people “learn from painful experience” and for the first time it was possible to shift “reflection” from the “strong guns and powerful ships” of imperialism to the cancer of their own cultural skin. “In fact, only such ‘unavoidable’ ‘selfreflection’ can produce a cultural criticism different from any previous one, and can also cause the real rupture of the Chinese traditional values that have not been broken several times” (Zhou, 1988). Although painful reflections also appeared on a group of wise elders including Ba Jin, the rupture of values or change of concepts first appeared in the younger generation, because these people with the lofty goal

Revolution in the depths of the soul 79 of “liberating all mankind” were the first to engage in the Cultural Revolution advocated by the great leader, and who were then the first to be ruthlessly abandoned by the Revolution.8 So, at the end of the horror, in the somewhat relaxed environment of the great debate and the liberation movement, in the form of “obscure poetry” and “scar literature”, they began to declare their unrepentant defection to the social reality or political oppression of the whole decade, and then criticized them mercilessly: Meanness is the pass of the mean, Nobleness is the epitaph of the noble. Look, in the gilded sky, It is full of the crooked reflections of the dead. The ice age is over, Why is there still ice everywhere? The Cape of Good Hope was discovered, Why do thousands of sails compete in the Dead Sea? I came into this world, With only paper, rope, and shadow. So that before the trial, Read the condemned voice: I tell you, the world, I—don’t—believe—it! Even with a thousand challengers at your feet, Then count me the thousandth and first. I I I I

don’t don’t don’t don’t

believe believe believe believe

the sky is blue, the echo of thunder, dreams are fake, in death without retribution.

If the oceans were destined to burst their banks, Let all the bitter water pour into my heart; If the land were to rise, Let mankind choose again the summit of survival. New turns and sparkling stars, Covering the open sky. Five thousand years of hieroglyphics, Those are the eyes of the future.9 Although facing hypocrisy and violence in real life, the poet Bei Dao calls out to the voice of the awakened younger generation with unprecedented courage—“I

80 Revolution in the depths of the soul don’t believe it”—and tries to rebel against the “mainstream discourse that dominates the world” (Zha, 2006: 74). Gu Cheng also stated: “The night gave me black eyes/But I used it to look for light” (Gu, 1986). But on the whole, “obscure poetry” expresses the dissatisfaction and resistance of the generation of young people in social transition to harsh social reality by means of montage, superposition of intention, mental leaps, or implications in a tortuous and not so straightforward obscure or hazy way. In contrast, “scar literature”,10 represented by Liu Xinwu’s Head teacher and Lu Xinhua’s Scar, appeared almost at the same time, yet in a more straightforward and bold way, castigating the great trauma brought to the Chinese people, especially the younger generation, by the “extreme left line” during the “ten-year catastrophe”. In 1979, when Liu Xinwu was commemorating the deaths of more than 100 writers persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, he asked profoundly: Why is it that in our socialist country, under the leadership of the communist party, we devote ourselves to the cause of literature and art serving the people and prospering the motherland, but at the same time should be prepared to sacrifice our lives. (Liu, 1979) This shows that many people’s reflections on the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution have gone from Mao Zedong’s personal autocracy to the institutional and cultural levels. This criticism not only aroused the whole nation’s deep reflection on this history, but, with the help of the forces of economic reform and opening to the outside world, directly produced tremors huge enough to rupture traditional values and social mindsets.11 However, on the whole, the rupture is only happening among the younger generation. As far as the whole society is concerned, although “practice is the only criterion for testing truth” had been established politically, the old ideology did not completely collapse in the face of the doubts of the younger generation, and sometimes it became more rigid. It made those young people who wanted to deviate from the norm in terms of values, life attitudes, and behavior patterns come up against a wall again and again. Despite widespread praise for obscure poetry and the publication of Bei Dao’s “The answer” and Shu Ting’s “To the oak”, which ran to millions of copies in the official poetry journal, Today, the magazine that gave birth to it had to shut down in a hurry in late 1980 (Zha, 2006: 76–77).12 The “democratic campaign” on campus, supported by some enlightened “superiors”, flourished in Beijing’s universities at the end of 1980 and was regarded by college students as “the first step to realize social democratization” (Lu, 2009: 38), though it soon disappeared under the pressure of reality. In Shanghai, the “Exhibition of 12 artists”, in Beijing, the “Exhibition of the unknown artists”, and the third consecutive “Star exhibition of arts” attracted the attention of young people while drawing serious criticism from conservatives—they were dismissed as a simple imitation of Western art and were even chased away by the police (Li Xianting, quoted in Zha, 2006: 300). In daily life,

Revolution in the depths of the soul 81 young people wear bell-bottom pants and are criticized as decadent in the west. Some units set up posts directly at the door and cut off the trouser legs of anyone who wears them. The government intervenes in everything from dressing, marital relations, to employment and resignation. On the one hand, the government says that young people should fight for the cause of communism, while real life is lifeless day after day. The government advocates devotion and selflessness, but in life everyone thinks for himself. (Peng, 2008) Spring seemed to be coming, but the air around it was still cool, and it brought greater confusion to those who were looking forward to the bright spring because of the long winter. The criticism of the external social force that distorted, suffocated, and destroyed people’s souls and dignity, shattered the “old wall” of traditional values in Chinese society and inevitably made people hesitate in the “wasteland” of the spiritual world. In May 1980, the confusion and anguish arising from this wasteland finally found an outlet in the release of Chinese Youth that month: I am 23 years old and I should say I have just stepped into life, but all the mysteries and attractions of life no longer exist for me. In the past, I was full of good wishes and hopes for life. When I was in primary school, I was told about How the Steel Was Tempered and Lei Feng’s Diary. Although I could not fully understand them, the heroic deeds also excited me night after night. I thought, my father, mother and grandfather were all Communist Party members, of course I also believed in communism, so I wanted to join the party in the future. This was doubtless. Shortly after I entered primary school, the cultural revolution began. And then it got worse and worse. I witnessed such phenomena: confiscation of homes, violence, and disregard for human life. There was no smile on the face of the family, and my grandfather was always carefully prepared for examination. Young people older than me talked dirty all day, played cards, and smoked. When I went to see my aunt off when she went to the countryside, I saw people covering their faces and crying and beating their chests. … I was then at a loss. I began to feel that the world around me was not as alluring as the books I had read before. I asked myself whether I believed in books or eyes. […] I trusted the organization. Once I gave advice to the leader, but it became the reason why I could not join the league for many years. […] I turn to friendship. But when once I made a little mistake, a good friend of mine secretly reported to the leadership what I had confided her. […] I seek love. I got to know a cadre’s son. His father was persecuted by the “gang of four” and was always in a miserable situation. I put my most sincere love and deepest sympathy on him, and soothed his wounds with my own wounded heart. … What I didn’t expect was that after the “gang of four” was crushed, he gained a new life and never spoke to me again. […]

82 Revolution in the depths of the soul I kept observing people in search of answers that give meaning to their lives. I consulted the white-haired old man, the young man, the cautious and conscientious teacher, the commune members who worked from dawn to dusk and many others, but none of them could give me a satisfactory answer. For example, some people said that life is for revolution, which sounded too empty and farfetching, and I didn’t want to listen to those preaching any more; some other people said that life is for fame, which sounded too far away from average people’s life; after all, not many people are remembered by history; still other people said life is for the benefit of all mankind, which has no connection with reality: They haggle over every trivial thing, and how could they claim that life was for mankind? But if you say life is for pleasure, every man comes out naked and dies with only a skin; life is nothing but a walk in the world, isn’t it? Many people advised me not to think hard, and said: “Life is just life. Many people do not understand the meaning of life, but can still live well.” But I can’t. (Pan, 1980) The letter, signed “Pan Xiao”13 and titled “The road of life is getting narrower and narrower”, soon attracted the attention of young people, becoming the first major youth cultural event in the 1980s (Lu, 2009: 34). Because Pan Xiao’s letter concerns such basic questions about values and outlook on life as: How should we view society? How to treat life? How can we live meaningfully when our ideals and reality are in conflict? What is a man’s life worth? These are questions which became more acute and unavoidable after the disillusionment brought by the “ten-year catastrophe”; it made readers of the time, especially the younger generation, “tremble”, “fear”, and “feel a bomb explode in their hearts”, because there had never been anything so real in the press before. Its pain, its indictment of previous didactic education, its bold challenge and subversion of the concept of life that is regarded as the golden rule, and its call and cry for self-worth that has been suppressed struck people, but also made people feel a cathartic pleasure. (Editorial department of China Youth, 2000: 9–10) This letter and Bei Dao’s “The answer” have both similarities and differences: Pan Xiao’s confusion on the meaning of life stems from Bei Dao’s cry of “I don’t believe it” when facing the contradiction between previous false moralizing and harsh reality, while the courage of Bei Dao to be the “thousandth and first” challenger makes people feel that he still has what Chen Danqing and Bei Dao stated in their introspection, “that flavor, that tone”, that is, the “revolutionary tone” (Zha, 2006: 95, 79). In brief, Bei Dao does not see things as clearly as Pan Xiao. I realize this truth: Anyone, whether living or engaging in creative activities, the purpose is subjectively for self, objectively for others. This is just

Revolution in the depths of the soul 83 like the sun shining, which is in the first place the inevitable phenomenon of the movement of the sun’s existence, and shining on all things is just an objective meaning derived from it. So I think, as long as everyone tries to improve the value of their own existence, the development of the whole human society will become inevitable. This is probably the law of man, and also some kind of law of biological evolution—this is a rule that no bossy sermon can cover up or cajole. (Pan, 1980) To be frank, the above outlook on life or values is not without its debatable points. Its biggest problem lies in overcorrecting, or letting the individual “pendulum” swing too far regarding the issue of individual social relations.14 Anyone who knows a little about the history of sociology knows that this kind of “subjectively for self, objectively for others” is nothing more than a copy of Spencer’s theory, which more than 100 years ago sought to reconcile social nominalism with social realism (Zhou, 2002: 72–76). On the one hand, Spencer emphasizes that society is made up of individuals pursuing their own interests; on the other hand, he is convinced that society can reconcile the private interest with the public interest through the invisible hand. Or, “individuals seek private ends but because such actions take place within a complex society built on the interdependence of institutions, the human agent unconsciously and unintentionally serves the higher needs of society as a whole” (Swingewood, 1984: 56). The awkwardness of the reconciliation theory does not lie in demonstrating the importance of society as a whole while explaining individual values, but the inability to encourage individuals to fully realize their value without harming the common interests of social groups. Contemporary to Spencer or even earlier, the French historian and sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville was concerned about the individualism that permeated American society. On the one hand, this individualism does originate from the equal status and material abundance of a democratic society, which has created a large number of individuals who can easily meet their material needs. These people owe nothing to others, and they want nothing from others; on the other hand, it is this individualism that isolates each member of the community from his peers, alienates them from their friends and relatives, so that once they have established their own small circle, they leave the whole society behind (Tocqueville, 1990: 98). Until now, a similar controversy has not gone unheard (Lasch, 1978; Bellab et al., 1985; Bell, 1996). However, any discussion of the individual and society here is neither intended nor should be allowed to diminish the incomparable progressive significance of the Pan Xiao discussion. It not only calls out the spiritual and moral distress and hesitation of the younger generation in a brave way, but also challenges the practice of replacing individual and individual interests with the empty “collective” and “state” before 1978 and killing individual dignity and individual needs with a one-sided collectivism in its own unique way. It is a bold reversal of the prevailing fundamentalist values and outlook on life. With letters from young people all over the country flooding into editorial offices, Pan Xiao’s letter triggered a big discussion about the significance of an

84 Revolution in the depths of the soul outlook on life. But the Pan Xiao discussion had not been peaceful from the start. Denying traditional values and outlook on life, and shouting for the repressed self with her own feelings, it was doomed to conflict with the mainstream ideology at that time. On the one hand, from June 1980 to the end of that year, Chinese Youth received more than 60,000 letters, many of which were signed by dozens or even hundreds of young people. “This number broke the record for the number of articles contributed to newspaper special discussions since liberation” (Ma & Ling, 1998: 114). Many people praised Pan Xiao’s courage and even thought her expression of “subjectively for oneself, objectively for others” was “the awakening of the times”. On the other hand, all sorts of criticism followed, from the grassroots up to the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China, which led China Youth magazine to publish a response article entitled “The echoes of sixty thousand hearts” in the first issue of 1981, and then, under strong political and social pressure, to publish a summary article entitled “Thinkers dedicated to the meaning of life”. In announcing the end of the whole discussion, it called the Pan Xiao discussion a “wave of thought liberation”, but at the same time tried to put back the overblown pendulum. However, the event was still not over: More than two years later, in the campaign to clean up mental pollution, “leftists” still did not forget to clean up this “mental toxic weed”. In December 1983, the Party Committee of Huazhong Institute of Technology in Wuhan sent a document entitled “Discussion on the meaning of life in China Youth and China Youth Daily spread a lot of wrong views and needed to be clarified” to relevant departments of the Central Committee. Under the still powerful political attacks, the editorial committee of China Youth magazine submitted the “Inspection report on the ‘Pan Xiao discussion’” to the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the League, admitting that “due to errors in the guiding ideology of the editorial department, insufficient critical articles were published, while articles to expose wrong thoughts and vent dissatisfaction were excessively prominent, resulting in bad effects of ‘discussion’ on the youth and society”. Then, after Guan Zhihao, the President of China Youth magazine, was transferred from it, the first issue in 1984 published an article by Chen Zhishang and Jin Kexi, “What’s wrong with ‘subjectively for self, objectively for others’?”, and the editorial department conducted a public review through “Editor’s notes”: “Due to our mistakes in work, this discussion is not effective and has been a bad influence among the youth. We should learn from it earnestly” (Editorial department of China Youth, 2000: 311). This discussion was not “justified” until 2000.15 Although it was “brutally killed” after 1983, and “more than 60,000 letters participating in the ‘Pan Xiao discussion’ were all turned into pulp as waste paper” (Peng, 2008), it occupies an inestimable place in the 42 years of ideological change or ideological liberation of the Chinese people, not just the younger generation. As early as 30 years ago, I wrote: Although this confusion and loss is naturally attributed to the mentality of the younger generation, thanks to Pan Xiao’s letter and the discussion on outlook on life and personal values mainly attended by young people, in

Revolution in the depths of the soul 85 fact, judging from the lingering fear of the ten years of the cultural revolution, which is mainly reflected in the older generation today, the older generation at that time felt much more lost and confused than the younger generation in the face of an unprecedented disaster in the cause for which they had almost devoted their lives. The reason why this national confusion and loss is first expressed by the “sadness” of the younger generation (they were once called “beat generation” and “lost generation” by some people) is only that the youth is directly faced with the choice of life’s path, and only the younger generation is likely to be the first to think about what qualitative leap should take place in people’s values and behaviors. (Zhou, 1988)

A drastically changing world Although the great debate on philosophy and values sparked by the Pan Xiao discussion was aborted by the “anti-spiritual pollution movement” in 1983, Chinese society in the 1980s did not stop because of this. On the contrary, under the guidance of wise elders such as Deng Xiaoping, especially driven by the audacity and enthusiasm of the younger generation, China, an ancient country that was hundreds of years behind and shut down for 30 years, began to spin like a top at high speed after the 1980s, and a series of unprecedented changes began to take place. Under the impetus of the reform, the practice of “Production quotas to households” started in Xiaogang of Anhui province after 1978, and, supported by Wan Li, Zhao Ziyang, and others, gave birth to the reform of the rural economic system dominated by the contract responsibility system of linked output, which led to the complete collapse of the people’s commune system implemented in China for 27 years in 1985. Since 1979, special economic zones that introduce foreign investment, implement tariff preferences, and adopt new wage systems and financial policies have been opened in Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou, and Xiamen, directly linking them with Hong Kong, Macao, and the rest of the world. Then, the 12th Congress of the Communist Party of China, held in 1982, put forward the systematic reform of the economic system, and two years later the Third Plenary Session of the 12th Central Committee put forward the concept of a “socialist commodity economy”. In 1982, Deng Xiaoping made a speech entitled “Reform of the leadership system of the party and the state”, which proposed the necessity of reforming the existing political system from the institutional level, abolishing the system of life tenure for cadres, opposing the cult of personality, and expanding socialist democracy and intra-party democracy (Deng, 1980). Under the opened-up situation, due to the incoming wave of world civilization and the influence of Western social thoughts, China not only set off a learning upsurge of “modernization” in 1984, but also made people generally aware of such modern concepts as “global consciousness”, “the third wave”, and “new technological revolution”. Driven by the two forces of reform and opening-up, modern values and social mentality emerged among a large number

86 Revolution in the depths of the soul of Chinese people, especially young people. They began to desire to be able to intervene actively instead of passively depending on economic life and social affairs, and started to actively engage in business, politics, and any work that could bring their talents into full play and improve their survival value. In a blink of an eye, “Shenzhen speed”, “Bu Xinsheng”, “Nian Guangjiu the ‘fool’”, the “Wenzhou model”, and the “south Jiangsu model” became the “hot spots” that people talked about; “time is money”, “efficiency is life”, and “concept renewal” also became people’s catchphrases. In the field of culture and education, “alienation fever”, “Nietzsche fever”, “Freudian fever”, “culture fever”, and “diploma fever” were also rising. This not only alleviated the “distress” of the older generation of intellectuals at the beginning of the reform and opening-up to the outside world because they were “isolated from western academia for a long time and could not keep up with their changes during the past 30 years” (Fei, 1985: 279), but also promoted the development and concept renewal of Chinese academia, so much so that 20 years later, Zha Jianying would still say that “the 1980s were a brief, fragile yet fascinating romantic period in contemporary Chinese history” (Zha, 2006: 3). In daily life, the changes brought about by the younger generation were even more ubiquitous: Starting with bell-bottom trousers, jeans, and shoulder-length hair, the clothes and hairstyles of the younger generation were increasingly personalized, fashionable, and diversified, while the clothes of the older generation became increasingly younger. Deng Lijun’s “When do you come again?”, Zhu Fengbo’s “Light in the window”, and Li Guyi’s “Love in the countryside”, the songs which used to be dismissed as decadent, became popular throughout the whole of society after causing ideological unease in adult society. And Cui Jian, who followed them, engendered a resonance and shock among those young people who “had nothing at all”.16 Gradually, no matter whether in films, television, or literature, the description of the life of young people almost replaced the description of the life of the whole nation, and the older generation gradually became accustomed to regard the life of the younger generation as their current life, and their aesthetic ideal and life interest were increasingly in line with the younger generation and the changing society. Even for “disco”, a dance with a strong sense of rhythm introduced by the younger generation, the older generation, after denouncing it with gnashing teeth, was soon as enthusiastic as the younger generation. But for a decade, “senior disco” gained unexpected popularity among people who had spent most of their lives in a society that was changing too slowly. However, these superficial and joyful changes in daily life did not immediately bring about a “splendid turn” of the whole society towards the new era of the market economy in terms of values and life attitudes. Social changes, especially the rapid advance to the market, won the praise of the younger generation, but they also aroused the anxiety of the older generation. So in January 1988, in the warm, humid winter of Shenzhen, the first confrontation broke out between the younger generation, who had embraced the market economy, and the older generation, who clung to the old ideology:

Revolution in the depths of the soul 87 The clash took place in the Shekou Industrial Zone in Shenzhen, the forefront of China’s reform and opening-up drive. On January 13, 1988, three famous “youth educators” from Beijing, Li Yanjie, Qu Xiao and Peng Qingyi, gathered with more than 70 young people from Shekou in the conference room on the 9th floor of China Merchants Building and held a “Symposium of youth education experts and Shekou youth”. What made these young educators who were famous for their speeches in the auditorium or even in the square uncomfortable at the beginning was that Shekou young people did not intend to listen to their one-way lectures of “preaching, teaching and solving perplexity”, but demanded a face-to-face and equal dialogue with these young educators. In the process of “dialogue”, the conflict first occurred in the view of the marginal role of “gold diggers” caused by the market economy: Young educators divide the young people who come to Shekou and Shenzhen into “entrepreneurs” and “gold diggers”. The latter, in their view, were those who, for personal gain and enjoyment of life, wanted to make a profit from the wealth created by others. Shekou youth believed that this view of “gold diggers” made people feel “isolated from the world. Nowadays, in special economic zones, the desire to make money and the ability to make money are regarded as the performance of talent, which is the progress of history and shows the change of values after natural economy and product economy are replaced by commodity economy,” and “there is no contradiction between devoting oneself to reform and opening-up and making a better life, because earning money and living a good life are not in conflict with the great cause of reform.” The conversation lasted only a few hours, but the intergenerational conflict was allencompassing: Young educators appreciate that “many self-employed people devote a large part of their income to the state and run public welfare undertakings”; the youth of Shekou, however, thought that the shudder lingering in the shadow of the “left” should not be praised. The young educators said, “It pains me to see so many foreign cars running in our country”, while the young people of Shekou thought that the answer was too superficial, because the backwardness was caused by the malpractice of the system, and in the era of reform and opening-up, it was backwardness to have nothing foreign. Educators could express their love for the motherland by “lighting people’s souls on fire” in speeches, but Shekou youth should also be allowed to express their love for the motherland in other ways. When it comes to people and things that are different from your own, you should not label others as “unpatriotic”. (Cao, 1988; Ma, 1989; Cherrington, 1997: 100–101) After young educators and Shekou youths parted in discord, the conflict of values did not disappear. According to their decades of authoritarian and intolerant upbringing, the older generation responded accordingly. The next day, when Qu Xiao gave a speech in Shenzhen, more or less in order to express his anger, he compared Shekou youth as “a man without hope”. Then, on the third day,

88 Revolution in the depths of the soul the Institute of Youth Education of Beijing Normal University, where Li Yanjie was the director, drafted the “Shekou symposium”, which was distributed from Shenzhen to the leaders of the central government and relevant units, declaring the symposium to be “sudden”, “provocative”, “the whole atmosphere being mocking and even hostile”, and “most of the statements made being clearly wrong” by going “astray”. Under such political pressure, the Shekou youth began to defend themselves. On February 1, 1988, the Shekou Newsletter, which was a prominent newspaper concerned with the wave of reform and opening-up, published a report “Shekou youth’s frank dialogue with Qu Xiao and Li Yanjie—Young educators meet young people’s challenges” on its front page, outlining the viewpoints that triggered the conflict between the two sides at the Shekou symposium. In the following six months, the Yangcheng Evening News and other newspapers reported and discussed the Shekou incident. On August 6, the People’s Daily, an ideological newspaper, also published a Q&A on the Shekou incident, written by Cao Xianbin. From then to January of the next year, several overseas media including the New York Times also reported the Shekou incident. In the eyes of Westerners, this incident reflects that, by 1980, the concept of selfsacrifice had fallen out of favor with the younger generation, who began to pay more attention to their own individuality and self-interests, rather than devoting themselves to the so-called “masses” (Cherrington, 1997: 101). Whether Western scholars are right or not, one thing is certain: In the process of promoting the commodity or market economy, there is a gap between the outlook on life and the values of the two generations. Not all older generations, however, express ignorance or fear of the values nurtured in the market economy. Yuan Geng, an old guerrilla in the Dongjiang column who joined the Anti-Japanese War in his youth and who then became the chairman of the Shekou Merchants Bureau, consciously stood by the youth: Two points can be made clear: First, since they were not here to preach, they must allow others to express their opinions; since it was a panel discussion, everyone could talk. Comrades Qu Xiao and Li Yanjie could have their own views, and should also allow other views to exist. We still need to advocate and insist that no matter who they are, no matter what school they are in, no matter what kind of views they have, as long as they do not oppose the Party or engage in personal attacks, we can allow them to publish, communicate and discuss their views here. But there is a point to make clear: we do not welcome the empty preaching of teachers, or the practice of not listening to different opinions, and even asking for the names and identities of those who disagree. Even I, an old man, can’t stand this kind of behavior, let alone young people! Second, I highly appreciate the saying, “I may disagree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to disagree.” It is our sacred right to defend freedom of speech enshrined in the constitution, and we hope that journalists will report this point of view. Therefore, we must protect the young man whose name was asked for and whose information was reported. Even if there is something

Revolution in the depths of the soul 89 wrong with his speech, this sort of thing that gets people punished for speaking out is not allowed to take place in Shekou. (Cao, 1988)17 In fact, in 1988, China’s reform towards the market and opening-up to the world had caused tension between different values in social life. This tension did not only exist between Shekou youth and “young educators”. On December 15, 1987, nearly a month before the Shekou incident, Qu Xiao, known as “the wrangler of real life”, had faced a less sharp but no less distinct challenge at Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu.18 This kind of conflict or tension widely existed in various places, units, and even families, but the Shekou incident brought it into the open in a direct way. In conflicts, we see that the older generation, with its ideological power, has a discourse hegemony that the younger generation does not. Relying on such hegemony, they can easily say that “the actions of those people in Shekou can be summarized as five wrongs: wrong position, wrong viewpoint, wrong content, wrong approach and wrong means” (Cao, 1988); they can also casually ask entrepreneurs in Shekou and Shenzhen: “Is Shekou still going to follow the path of socialism?” And once the problem is raised to the height of “capitalism” or “socialism”, it will not only be an idea conflict between generations, but actually become an ideological confrontation between openness and conservatism. This kind of confrontation can be seen everywhere during the 42 years of reform and opening-up. However, the tide of ideological liberation, though it had suffered from several cold winters, finally moved forward with vigor (Lu, 2009: 46). However, compared with the “Pan Xiao discussion”, the biggest change of the younger generation after eight years was that they were no longer confused: they seemed to have a sense of their own choices and they also realized for the first time that their life mentor was themselves. It is in this sense that this symposium and the resulting Shekou incident “realized the historical adjustment of social values including inter-generational values in the violent collision of values” (Liao, 2006), and the value concept of the “whole society” took a sharp turn toward the market from this. Only a few years later, the significance of the Shekou incident in the transformation of Chinese values became apparent. I say this effect was felt a few years later because, as we all know, the larger Tiananmen Square political disturbances of 1989 nearly turned the reform wheel into a political whirlwind. Whatever the motives of the participants (and apparently different people had different motives in the protests), and whatever they did in Tiananmen Square, the political turmoil gave those opponents to reform ammunition to oppose it. From the second half of 1989, all sorts of talk of a resurgence spread throughout China. Some people said, “I heard that the central government will abolish the self-employed”; some people said, “The policy of studying abroad will change”; others said, “We need to stop reform and opening-up, and it is time to focus on class struggle”; and others even said, “We should restore the May 7th cadre schools and allow intellectuals to go back to the countryside for re-education” (Ma & Ling, 1998: 160–161). On February 22, 1990, the People’s Daily published a long article with considerable ideological authority: “On opposing bourgeois liberalization”. The article asked: “Do

90 Revolution in the depths of the soul those who engage in bourgeois liberalization have economic roots? Is there an economic force behind them?” After questioning whether the reform was “capitalist” or “socialist”, the author bluntly wrote, “In the final analysis, their economic reform is to eliminate public ownership as the main body and to realize privatization, on the one hand, and abolish the planned economy and realize marketization, on the other” (Wang, 1990). Obviously, in the author’s opinion, the emerging middle class, private owners, and self-employed were the economic root of bourgeois liberalization. The above article is merely the loudest voice in the tumult made in the resurgence of the Left. Thus, in an ideological climate that swung sharply to the left, the private and individual economies that grew up after reform and opening-up hit rock bottom. Shi Xianmin’s research found that, after 1989, many self-employed people in Beijing would rather merge their business into the tertiary production network of the street, because “by doing so, the business is collective. Although I have to pay more money to it, I will not be afraid any more” (Shi, 1993: 89). Indeed, in those two years there were three million fewer self-employed people in China, and about half of the private sector closed its doors. The bosses walked away with the money, the workers were swept out, and all of a sudden there were no jobs. (Ling, 2008: 55) As economic reforms hit a chill, political nostalgia began to spread across China. In the middle of the summer of 1990, or as early as the end of 1989, Mao Zedong, who had been laid to rest for more than a decade, became the focus of Chinese attention again. His portrait was rehung in many halls. Mao Zedong badges, which were produced in large numbers during the Cultural Revolution, were put back on some people’s chests. Mao Zedong Walking to the Altar and Mao Zedong Walking Down the Altar and other books began to appear on the best-selling list; songs praising Mao Zedong were made into cassettes called The Red Sun Anthem, which sold millions; many places, including the editorial department of College Students magazine, began to hold discussions or symposia about “Mao Zedong fever” with great fanfare (Zhang & Song, 1991: 7–44).19 Although there are various reasons for the emergence of Mao Zedong fever, it is clear that, as Zheng Zhongbing put it, some people were trying to promote it in order to create a “Deng Xiaoping chill” (Ling, 2008: 24–25). In fact, Zheng Zhongbing or Ling Zhijun or anyone with any reason was not hypersensitive to such vigilance. For example, in the “College students ‘looking for Mao Zedong fever’ symposium” organized by the editorial department of College Students magazine on New Year’s Day 1990, Xin Ming, a graduate student in the philosophy department of Peking University who was quite familiar with Mao Zedong’s poems, put forward an important argument, using quotes from the poems, which proved that such vigilance was not groundless. Facing questions on the causes of Mao Zedong fever, Xin Ming’s answer was: “We welcome the Monkey King today, because the demons are back again”. His

Revolution in the depths of the soul 91 response to the reversal that had begun in Eastern Europe was relaxed: “The plum flowers are glad of snow, while flies are frozen to death”. Most of all, this young man who consciously grasped the pulse of the times even warned: The song “Fill the world with love” was sung all over China at one time, but then a storm came out of the blue and “Hand in Hand” turned into “Gun to Gun”, and people have finally found it necessary to “never forget the class struggle” while being affectionate to each other. (Xin, 1991) Fortunately, in China in the 1990s, the ideological tensions had fallen out of favor with most people, especially the younger generation. After the political fever died out, with the material and spiritual foundation laid by the reform and opening-up in the previous decade, the secularization wave of the living world rose quietly among the younger generation, at first. Built in 1987 to the south-west of Mao Zedong Memorial Hall, “the largest KFC fried chicken restaurant in the world” (Naisbitt & Naisbitt, 1990: 147) did not decline because of China’s vigilance towards the West; on the contrary, it quickly became an industry leader in the following years, and by 1991 it had the highest turnover among more than 9,000 restaurants in the world. The following year, the spring of Deng Xiaoping’s “southern tour”, another American fast-food company, McDonald’s, opened its first Beijing branch on Wangfujing Street, attracting 40,000 customers on its opening day (Yan, 2000: 204). From 1990, though, Beijing became full of young people wearing T-shirts with round necks and short sleeves printed with words and patterns. The shirts might read “Supporting a family”, “No way to go abroad, no capital to be a peddler”, and “Don’t bother me”—the younger generation vent their confusion and dissatisfaction in their own unique way—but at the same time, Chinese clothes, especially those of the younger generation, were still changing into a colorful fashion at an unprecedented rate. In 1988, Nike and Montagut were popular; in 1989, Adidas and Playboy were popular; so were Baleno and Diadora in 1990; and Leonardo and Goldlion in 1991 (Wang, 1992: 220). If Cui Jian’s rock ’n’ roll, which became popular in 1990 by donating money to the Beijing Asian games, was something of a political catharsis,20 then, after Deng Lijun, Qi Qin, and the campus songs in the 1980s, Hong Kong and Taiwan singers flooded into the mainland from 1989 to 1991: Tong Ange, Tan Yonglin, Zhang Xueyou, Zhao Chuan, and Ye Qianwen. Countless Hong Kong and Taiwan singers completely soothed the political nerves of mainland fans. During this period, the number of tapes by mainland singers was only 10,000–30,000, while the number of tapes by Hong Kong and Taiwan singers was 300,000 (Beijing Hantang Culture Development Co. LTD, 1997: 36). Also in 1990, “karaoke”,21 which is still very much alive today, became popular. The songand-dance hall that first appeared in Xili Lake Resort in Shenzhen ten years ago (Wang, 2001) suddenly opened one after another in metropolises across the country. In half a year, there were more than 30 in Shanghai, more than 40 in Guangzhou, and more than 50 in Beijing (Ling, 2008: 8). In this year, poetry was still the young

92 Revolution in the depths of the soul people’s favorite, but the popular Wang Guozhen poems had neither the rage of “Tiananmen poems” nor the hazy mood of poems by Bei Dao and Shu Ting: If you’re not happy enough Don’t lock your brows Life is short Why still cultivate bitterness Open the dusty doors and windows Let sunlight and rain spread all over the corner Headed for the wilderness of life, Let the wind iron your forehead Extensiveness dilutes sorrow Darker colors can cover lighter ones. The straightforward but shallow words from this poem entitled “If you are not happy” (Wang, 1991: 125) were ridiculed by Zhu Dake as poetry “mah-jong” or “lipstick” (Zhu, 1991); and the success of Wang Guozhen’s poem, which was similar to “selling travel shoes and t-shirts” (Yuan & Li, 1992: 27), was strikingly in keeping with the whole mood of Chinese society’s shift toward secularization and marketization. I believe that these natural, rather than forced, changes in the living world show the popular sentiment of Chinese society by action rather than by vote. I also believe that the natural attachment of the Chinese people, especially the younger generation, to opening-up and reform after the political turmoil, gave comfort and confidence to Deng Xiaoping, who became more or less anxious after the Tiananmen Square political disturbance and the Eastern European upheaval. As early as the Spring Festival in 1991, he encouraged the Shanghainese not to be intimidated by the voice of the Left (Ma & Ling, 1998: 167). Then, at the beginning of 1992, the 88-year-old Deng Xiaoping decided to go south, and in Shenzhen, the frontier of reform and openingup, proposed that socialism could also be a market economy, overwhelming the pointless debate over whether China’s reform was capitalist or socialist, and placed the stalled reform wheel back on the fast track. On January 19, Deng Xiaoping, who had just settled down in Guiyuan in Shenzhen, said to Xie Fei, Secretary of the Guangdong Provincial Party Committee, and his subordinates: Failure to adhere to socialism, reform and opening-up, the development of the economy and the improvement of people’s lives will only lead to a dead end. The basic line must be adhered to for a hundred years without wavering. Only by sticking to this line will the people believe in you and support you. Whoever wants to change the line, principles and policies adopted since the Third Plenary Session of the CPC Central Committee will never be accepted by the common people and will be defeated. (Deng, 1993b, Vol. 3: 370)

Revolution in the depths of the soul 93 It was a rousing speech, but, except for comments by the Liberation Daily in Shanghai and the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily in Shenzhen, which revealed some of Deng’s ideas, it was overlooked for more than 40 days nationwide. It wasn’t until March 26 that the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily published a report titled “The wind from the east brings spring—A documentary of Deng Xiaoping’s tour in Shenzhen” (Chen, 1992), which finally confirmed the hearsay. I heard about Xiaoping’s “southern tour” on February 16, 1992. I remember it was the last day of the winter vacation. It was also a Sunday. The next day, the new spring semester was about to start. I went to fetch letters from the Sociology Department where I taught, where I met Professor P., a colleague whom I talked to about everything. Professor P., who lived in the Communist Party’s compound, was often the best source of information in Nanjing, a semi-frontier city with a closed border. Professor P., who always had a loud voice, pulled me mysteriously into the corridor this time and asked in a low voice, “Do you know something serious has happened?” Horrified, I asked, “What now?” P. answered, “Don’t panic. Good thing. Deng went for a ‘southern tour’. It’s opening up again.” “Really?” I couldn’t help but take it with a grain of salt, because just a month ago, on the day before the school holiday, the theme of a report on campus was “To build colleges and universities into bridgeheads against peaceful evolution”. It was indeed “the wind from the east brings spring”. On May 21 of this year, the Shanghai stock exchange, which opened in 1990, announced it would remove all trading price restrictions and be completely guided by the market. As a result, share prices rose over the next three days, jumping 570%. A large color photograph of Deng Xiaoping’s inspection of the south was published in the Liberation Daily, with the title “Strolling”. At the same time, the newspaper also borrowed Deng Xiaoping’s words to advocate “changing the mind”, and if one “does not change his mind, he’ll be replaced”. The people who were active on the stage did change: Tian Jiyun, Li Rui, Yu Guangyuan, Wang Meng, Sun Changjiang, Tong Dalin, Li Yining, and Wu Jinglian, who had said little or nothing a few years ago, became active again, loudly cheering for the market economy, reform, and opening-up. In July, Deng received a letter signed by hundreds of university students wishing him longevity and praising the southern speech—this old man, who received “Hello Xiaoping” on National Day’s 35th anniversary ceremony eight years ago—realized that his policy of reform and opening-up had completely closed the gap, between the younger generation and their elderly but not conservative elders, caused by the 1989 storm. The next topic concerns how to advance the market economy in the field of economics and how to advance the two generations together in the field of social life.

Who became the first “marginal men”? The most exciting year for the Chinese was 1992, and for the first time the excitement had nothing to do with politics. After the stock exchanges in

94 Revolution in the depths of the soul Shenzhen and Shanghai lifted price limits, the stock market began to grow at a tenfold, hundredfold rate. In August of this year, the Shenzhen Stock Exchange announced the issuance of 500 million new shares and 5 million lottery forms, which resulted in 1.5 million people flooding into Shenzhen, then home to 600,000 permanent residents, within two days. Post offices were inundated with ID cards, the largest of which weighed 17.5 kg and contained 2,500 subscription ID cards. A crowd of 1.5 million people packed the 300 initial public offering (IPO) venues across the city, nearly causing a riot (Jia, 2008). It was also in this year that Chinese people’s enthusiasm for business reached a historical peak. Bo Xicheng, director of the Beijing Tourism Bureau and son of Bo Yibo, went into business; Li Jianping, the Party Secretary of Nanjing since the age of 28, was only 35 when he went into business; famous actors like Liu Xiaoqing, Zhu Penggbo, Mao Shanyu, Huang Wanqiu, and Chen Xiaoxu went into business; writers Lu Wenfu and Zhang Xianliang went into business; even the 74-year-old Jiang Xuemao, who wrote the planned economy era’s textbook Political Economy, was encouraged by the youth to dip his toe in the water—his firm, called Furrand Economic Advisors, is reminiscent of the Rand Corporation of America, which Fudan University, where he is from, and the firm’s 11 fund-raisers aspire to. Seven women majoring in environmental protection at Nanjing Hehai University simply sold tea eggs on the roadside, sparking a debate about the pros and cons of business for college students and making them far more famous than their school, the former East China Institute of Water Conservancy. In Nanjing that year, a far less open city than Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, 40.6% of people had engaged in economic activities outside of their jobs. Specifically, 14.9% had had a second job, 9.2% had traded stocks, 8.7% had exchanged treasury bonds or foreign exchange certificates, and 7.4% had traded on stalls; 34.2% had attended fashion training classes, with the most popular ones including foreign languages, computers, stocks and futures, and public relations etiquette. Of the 47.3% who ate “foreign fast food” such as KFC or McDonald’s, 64.9% did it for taste and 8.9% to keep up with new trends, while fewer than 5.2% did it because it tasted good. Finally, the number of people who had played hula hoops during the period when they swept the mainland reached 44.6%, with 55.4% being women. In our survey, the top ten buzzwords of 1992–1993 were, in order: getting into business, stock market, bid for the Olympic Games, second career, mobile phone, tycoon, enthusiast, making a fortune, taxi, and boss. The illiterate ranked “unemployed” in third place; those whose monthly earnings were less than 100 CNY ranked “unemployed” in second place (they were not capable enough to get into business, or had no business to get into); all the other respondents listed “getting into business” in first place, which shows that the flood of “getting into business” in China in 1992 was unstoppable (Zhou, 1995). Although Chinese values and attitudes were once again becoming more open, a closer look reveals that the changes were still generally being initiated by the younger generation. The G family is a typical case among seven families in Nanjing interviewed in 1998. NGF, then 50, was an air force pilot in a helicopter

Revolution in the depths of the soul 95 regiment near Nanjing before moving to a local bank to head a trade union. NGM, about her husband’s age, was a technician at a large, failing, state-run metallurgical company. “My father was a production captain for a long time, but his feudal ideology was very serious, and his word carried much weight in the village,” recalls NGF, who came from a village in Haian, north Jiangsu province. Don’t say anything about me, not even the other adults in the village dare challenge him. In 1965, I passed more than ten rounds of physical examination and political examination to be admitted to the aviation school, thus becoming an enviable air force pilot at that time. This matter caused a sensation in the whole county, and I was also a person who had seen the past. However, whenever I went home to visit my family, I knew some of my father’s views and practices were wrong, but I could not directly refute him. … So I never influenced my parents. (NGF, 1998) But 30 years later, after NGF’s own family produced two college students, their daughter NGG, 23, a graduate student in foreign literature at a Chinese university, and their son NGB, 19, a graduate student in investment banking at a university, the trajectory of changes in values and attitudes from children to parents became increasingly clear. You know, I stayed in the military for over 20 years. In the past, the nation was very strict with the air force, especially pilots. At that time, the army stipulated that even shortwave radios could not be bought, for fear that you would “eavesdrop on enemy stations” and run over there. My wife (NGM) specialized in electronics, and except for the technical things, she knew nothing about romance or exoticism, just like me. But now things have changed. NGG, who majors in modern foreign literature, often brings home a variety of modern western novels, such as Gone with the Wind, For Whom the Bell Tolls, In Remembrance of the Past, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Chinese novels like Zhang Ailing’s Red Rose and White Rose and Wang Shuo’s Half Fire and Half Sea. My son NGB, who studies finance, talks about either investment or various popular blockbusters with me. So, can you avoid seeing these blockbusters? Can you watch them without becoming addicted? Well, I can’t believe it. In the old days we wouldn’t read these novels or movies for anything. At that time, they were all 100 percent “blue” works. Anyone who read them would be expelled from the party and banned from flying missions. (NGF, 1998) In fact, not only father NGF expressed many feelings; mother NGM, who had been treated and recuperated in hospital and at home for breast cancer in recent years, did not care about anything except electronic technology in the past, but now has more time to read all kinds of trendy novels brought back by NGG.

96 Revolution in the depths of the soul According to the general view, parents have a rich and bumpy social experience, and they can give their children a great help or influence in understanding the social and life experience, but in fact I think children today sometimes see society in a better light than their parents do. Take me for example. I can’t understand why so many people have been laid off and why our state-owned enterprises are failing. But whenever NGG and her classmates come to see me, they tried to persuade me. Some of these students are now graduate students in key universities, and some are working in provincial and municipal institutions, and their views on many phenomena at the present stage are more comprehensive and profound than mine. They say the reform of state-owned enterprises is to break the big pot and reduce the pressure on the state. They also told me that such is the case in times of institutional reform and that there is no need to make a fuss. […] Take my illness for example. At first, I was under a lot of psychological pressure because I had to take medicine and chemotherapy. But my children, while encouraging me to build confidence and fight the disease, went to the school library and came back to tell me, “One third of these diseases can be cured, and one third will get better after treatment … Mom, you are sure to be one of the first one third.” Now, after more than a year of treatment, my disease is basically under control. To be honest, I am very grateful to the children who give me not only the knowledge about the disease, but more importantly, the strength and confidence to live my life. (NGM, 1998) The change in values driven by offspring occurs not only between the children who go to college and their parents, but also between the ordinary middle school students or workers and their parents. We met NCG, who was only 13 years old at that time, in an ordinary middle school when we chose the typical group of interview members in Nanjing. The little girl in the second year of junior high school was very thin and looked shy. Because we were afraid that she would not dare to speak in front of her parents, we asked her if she dared to tell the truth to their faces. She did not hesitate at all, but said “Yes”. It was this child who spoke with a childlike look, but with a very sophisticated voice. Her parents were both working in the foundation office of a large company with good benefits. Her father NCF had also had a junior college education, and his income was good, so, naturally, he felt little pressure from work during ordinary times, and always felt more than sufficient compared with others. Their 13-year-old daughter, who was far from home at school, always left early and came home late. One day, other men in her father’s company saw her carrying a big schoolbag all day long and leaving in the wind and rain. So they asked, “NGG, aren’t you working too hard?” She replied as an adult, “So what can be done? I’m not doing this for a living!” NCF said: You think, is that something a 13-year-old can say? At that time, I was shocked and deeply moved. On the one hand, I love my daughter; on the

Revolution in the depths of the soul 97 other hand, I felt that what she said was an inspiration and a spur to her mother and me. I think we have to keep recharging; otherwise, how can you keep up? (NCF, 1998) The same scene was observed in the “Zhejiang village” outside the famous Red Gate of Beijing in the 1990s (Wang, 1995; Zhou, 1998a; Xiang, 2002). In 1983, the Lu brothers, young Yueqing farmers who had been in the garment business in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, lost money and moved to Beijing. They rented a local house in Haihutun, set up sewing machines and set up a cutting table, and resumed their business in Beijing. Since then, the news that the Lu brothers had made a fortune in the “treasure land” of Beijing continued to stimulate the Wenzhou people, who are “naturally” sensitive to the market. They began arriving in the capital in the form of “chain migrations” from one to several districts. By 1996, the area of Zhejiang village had been extended to 24 natural villages in five townships including Dahongmen and Nanyuan. The whole southern part of Beijing was dotted with new Zhejiang villages, with more than 100,000 farmers living in them, about 75% of whom were from Yueqing (among whom 40–50% were from the former Hongqiao district of Yueqing county).22 Zhejiang people here were mainly self-employed businessmen. With a certain amount of capital and technology, they were principally engaged in garment processing and sales, with an annual revenue of billions. In the 1990s, the government cleaned up the Zhejiang villages every year, but they survived stubbornly, and they finally defeated the management system of a planned economy with the vitality of a market economy. Parents who made a living in the Zhejiang village were not old. They grew up in Yueqing, Wenzhou, which is no more than five kilometers from Yandang Mountain and Hongqiao town, which have thousands of years of history, as well as generations of business history. The market was held on the third and eighth day of every ten days on the lunar calendar, was established during the Wanli period of the Ming dynasty, and has existed in the local area for more than 400 years (Lecheng County Records). Even under the strict social controls of the Mao Zedong era, the number of migrant workers in many parts of Wenzhou, who flicked cotton and traded chicken feathers for sugar, often reached more than 50% (interview with Ni Xuebao; Jin, 1989: 70, 232).23 After the reform and opening-up, Wenzhou farmers’ incomparable entrepreneurial advantages, or their modern consciousness of mobility and risk, were actually born in their peripatetic and urban experience before 1980 (Zhou, 1998b, 1999b). However, compared with their younger children, these “old quacks” are inferior. When we interviewed in Zhejiang villages in 1995, we found that children, especially boys, generally took over from their fathers between the ages of 16 and 18 and became the leaders of family-centered clothing or shoe workshops. Ms. BVF, who was 44 and helping her 18-year-old son, said that, although she had been influenced by Wenzhou’s business consciousness since she was a child

98 Revolution in the depths of the soul and was familiar with and able to accept the flow and commodity economy, she couldn’t do business in Beijing without her son’s further “inspiration”: He not only knows what products are easy to sell and how to deal with the industrial and commercial tax authorities in Beijing, but also knows all kinds of national policies very well. He can speak the same language as a Beijinger and understand the spirit of “superior documents”, so I let him run the show. (BVF, 1995) For a sociologist, the story of the Zhejiang village is very reminiscent of the stranger concept invented by the gifted Simmel. The Wenzhou farmers who broke into the capital and then into Paris (Wang, 2000) are the ones who “come today and stay tomorrow” (Simmel, 1950: 402), as a result, they have inevitably become what Park called the marginal man between city and country, between tradition and modernity. In fact, the majority of Chinese living today—especially the large number of so-called “Beijing drifters” who live stubbornly in Beijing for literature, film, painting, and art without registered permanent residence, employment, social insurance, housing, or even love—are to some extent marginal people, because they are all in rapid transition from tradition to modernity. It is just that people who venture into the Zhejiang village in Beijing exist in the marginal state of the dual latitude of time (traditional–modern) and space (rural–urban). The concept of the marginal man originated from Robert E. Park, a sociologist at the University of Chicago. In 1928, in “The migration of man and the marginal man”, Park, following Simmel’s thinking, compared marginal man to a cultural hybrid, who is placed in two different groups, but not completely belonging to either, and whose self-concept is contradictory and incongruous. In Park’s own words, the marginal man lives in two worlds where he is more or less an outsider. However, this marginality is not only a burden, but also a wealth, because he will be a broader, smarter, more fair, and rational individual than his cultural background. “Marginal people” are relatively more civilized people. It is in the mind of the marginal man that the moral turmoil which new cultural contacts occasion manifests itself in the most obvious forms. It is in the mind of the marginal man—where the changes and fusions of culture are going on—that we can best study the processes of civilization and of progress. (Park, 1928: 893) If we make a detailed and in-depth analysis of marginal people, we find that they can be divided into at least two basic subtypes. One is the particular personality at the turning point of two social forms or at the boundary of two eras, such as Engels referred to Dante, the last poet of the Middle Ages and the first poet of the modern age (Marx & Engels, 1972, Vol. 1: 249). The second is

Revolution in the depths of the soul 99 a particular personality at the intersection of two cultures, like Lin Yutang, who lived between American and Chinese cultures, or many Chinese migrant workers today, who live between the city and the countryside. Therefore, we can divide types of marginal people into two subtypes: diachronic marginal people and synchronic marginal people. Diachronic marginal man can also be called “transitional man”, who generally appears in the period of social unrest or social transformation. The alternation of old and new ideas, the transformation of tradition to modernity, the change of social structure and the revolution of science and technology, all produce a feeling of loss, anomy, conflict, and estrangement in the heart. But we will also see that some of them will end up being the wave riders, the pioneers, such as “young China” Liang Qichao, the new youth of the May the Fourth movement period, the new poets in the April Fifth Movement, as well as the younger generation in China’s reconstruction of the market economy era. In his impassioned “Treatise on the transitional age”, Liang Qichao coined the terms “transitional age” and “transitional person”: I do not wish to speak of the heroes of the old world, nor dare to speak of the heroes of the new world, but only the heroes of the transition era who rise up at the center of the old and new boundaries. In my opinion, there are three indispensable virtues in this kind of hero: First is the spirit of adventure, which is indispensable at the beginning of the transitional era. The transition means improvement, and the innovator cannot remain in his old form, just as the progressive must abandon his old way … The second is persistence, which is indispensable in the middle of the transition era. The transition person cannot regress, but only progress, while it is difficult to progress but easy to regress, so it is very rare not to go back halfway without extraordinary persistence … The third is flexibility, which is indispensable at the end of the transition … The figures of the transition era should be accompanied by the spirit of a statesman with the courage of a soldier. […] Transitional people are springs of hope, rare and precious in this world. Where there is progress, there is transition, and where there is no transition, there is no progress. (Liang, 1999: 466, 464) More than half a century later, Liang Qichao’s vision was echoed across the Pacific: American social psychologist D. Lerner came to similar conclusions from his study of the modernization process in the Middle East. If many people in a society become “transitional people”, the society begins to move from tradition to modernity. In 1958, in the Disappearance of the Traditional Society, Lerner was the first to express what would later be enriched by another sociologist, Ingalls: Modernization was primarily a state of mind, such as the expectation of progress, the tendency to grow, and the readiness to adapt oneself to change. To modernize, we must adjust our personality, that is to say, we must have a kind of “spiritual mobility” and “empathic ability”. Like Liang Qichao,

100 Revolution in the depths of the soul Lerner described the basic characteristics of “transitional man” in his comparison with traditionalists. Transitional people differed from traditionalists in the underlying structure of their tendencies and attitudes. They tended to have a rich capacity for empathy, for seeing things that other people did not see. He lived in a fantasy world that traditionalists could not share. His attitude was a desire; he really wanted to see what his “mind’s eye” saw, and to live in the world he had always imagined (Lerner, 1958: 73). According to Lerner, a transitional person is one who lives on a “traditional–modern” continuum. He is in and out of tradition; he has crossed the threshold of modernity, but has not fully embraced it. Accordingly, his behavior was governed by a “dual value system”: He craves modern stimulation but has not yet been able to break away from traditional elbow control. Ambrose King, a sociologist, agrees. He writes that because transitional people live in a “dual value system”, they often experience “value dilemmas”. Psychologically, on the positive side, he has a shifting feeling towards the new and the old, and on the negative side, he also has a rejection of both the new and the old. This collision of values and emotional conflict causes embarrassment and emotion causes the inner depression and frustration of the transitional person, who therefore suffers pain (King, 1999: 79). Different from a diachronic marginal person, a synchronic marginal person is one who lives in two different cultures due to an international marriage, foreign visits, studying abroad, immigration, and other reasons—even including Chinese farmers who moved from closed and traditional villages to open and modern cities, which almost at the same time brings them under the influence and education of two different cultural types. Although they still carry the conflict between the old value system and the existing values in their hearts, they basically get rid of and transcend the old culture of their native or local communities, and can have a more objective, rational, and clear understanding of the cultural differences between their own nation or community and other nations or communities. It is based on this characteristic that the marginal person has become the ideal personality of cross-cultural research in the eyes of cultural anthropologists. In this regard, a Chinese–American scholar Francis L. K. Hsu is a typical example. He described himself as a marginal man, born and raised in a culture where life was stagnant and most people’s lives were almost entirely predictable. Later, he was expelled from this culture to live and work in another. In the latter culture, people yearned for change in the pursuit of progress, as they believed the appearance of all things and beings was always changing. As a man in such contrasting cultures, he inevitably hovered on the edge of both, so he said he was like two people walking on the edge of these two cultures (Hsu, 1988: 3). In the process of cultural integration and social transformation, it is a very common phenomenon for a person to live in two or more cultures or subcultures, and this experience is a very positive factor for both individuals and society. Because they are at the forefront of cultural openness, communication, and choice, marginalized people have become the “spiritual preemies” of our times and their social groups. Because they are not only sensitive to the differences

Revolution in the depths of the soul 101 between different ethnic groups or communities, but also highly sensitive to the development of the times, they can often become a bridge of understanding and communication between ethnic groups or communities, and become pioneers for guiding society forward. It is because marginal people have such advantages that Francis L. K. Hsu will write: “I am convinced that every scholar who dabbles in another society and culture and those who wish to share their understanding of that society and culture must consciously make themselves ‘marginal’ in some sense” (Hsu, 1988: 4). Lin Yutang’s “Two feet on the east and west culture, a single mind on the universe articles” (Lin, 2000: 421) can more concisely express the ideals of marginal people than cultural research scholars. The only difference between transitional people and marginal people is that the former is the result of cultural or era transformation, while the latter is the product of cultural integration or space movement. However, in our age, the cultural transformation and integration of a certain society are often a concomitant phenomenon. On the one hand, our culture has changed or accelerated due to its blending with other cultures. On the other hand, changes and transformations in our culture have added urgency and inclusiveness to other cultures. Therefore, in modern society where the whole earth is becoming smaller and smaller, the communication between different cultures is becoming more and more frequent, and the economy and culture of various countries and nations are often developing at a speed hundreds or thousands of times faster than the previous society, a marginal person has indeed become a very common transformational personality, and it can even be considered that all social members of our time are more or less pregnant with the germ of marginal personality. This generalized tendency towards marginal personality deepens the mental fission and identity crisis of our age: Words such as personality fission, wandering mind, value vacuum, behavior disorder, psychological fatigue, mental anxiety, psychological loss, psychological weightlessness, and looking for a spiritual home appear so frequently in various publications, which fully reflects the marginal nature of modern people’s mental state (Ye, 1996: 9). But do not lose sight of the other side of the marginal. The open vision, the spirit of doubt and criticism, the nature of adventure and flow, the impulse to try, the capacity for comparison and empathy, the secular tendency and instrumental rationality, and the choice and respect for multiculturalism—it is in the spiritual world of marginal people that all the possibilities of the transformation of Chinese society towards modernity are placed. We say that most people in contemporary Chinese society are more or less in the mental state of marginal people, but it is clear that the younger generation is the first marginal people. In this great transformation of the Chinese spirit, the younger generation is ahead of its time, not only because they are less bound by tradition, but also because they are closer to the influence of modernity. Not only are they by nature rebelling against political tyranny and spiritual shackles, but a China that is moving towards democracy and freedom offers them a wide range of intellectual possibilities, both because they are young and eager to learn and create, and because the open world in the context of globalization. Not only are they naturally intelligent and keen, but because the 30

102 Revolution in the depths of the soul years before 1978 deprived their parents or grandparents of their rights and opportunities for spiritual independence, the great gap between the generations has contributed to the rich lives of the younger people. During my interview in Shanghai, I met SKF, a partner of one of Shanghai’s leading law firms. The interview with SKF and his family fully reflects the difference between the growing environment of the generation born in the 1970s and their parents, and further, the greater change of the growing environment between them and their children. SKF, 41, grew up in a rural village in Hong’an, Hubei province, and the only hope his parents, who farmed in the poor central countryside, had for him was to be able to study well. For this reason, every year before the beginning of the school year, SKF would sign a “contract” with his father when he asked his parents for tuition and miscellaneous fees, writing down where he would rank in the class on the final exam. The result, of course, was that he was “beaten up” by his irascible father every year, because he was always falling short of his goals. Fortunately, SKF’s pain was not in vain, and he was recommended to enter Fudan University college without an entrance examination (which is still a legend in the village). At first, SKF was recommended to major in mathematics, but because he was so afraid of poverty, he soon transferred to the law department which promised a better income after graduation; he became a practicing lawyer in Shanghai Grand Beach after graduation. To be honest, we have come to the good times of reform and opening-up. A child born in rural Hubei province like me was able to enter Shanghai and Fudan University, and able to change my major from mathematics to law to become a partner of a big law firm now. These things were really hard to even think about in the past. But my childhood and adolescence were miserable compared to my children’s. Fortunately, I did not know what was called “sweet” life at that time, because I never went out of the house, and compared with my village neighbors, I thought my family was doing well. I said I was beaten up by my parents, but now I have never beaten my own child! Not only have I never spanked my children, but I also accompany them to learn musical instruments, do homework or play games no matter how busy I am. The 11-year-old SKG has passed the piano level 4, and the six-year-old SKB has also played the drum set in a proper way … I think the biggest difference between generations is not the change in material life, but the completely different expectations from parents. My parents’ hope for me was to get out of the “farming gate” and make a difference in the future, whereas my hope for my children is that they will grow up healthy and happy. (SKF, 2014) In fact, SKF’s hopes for his children’s growth are not simply expressed as playing games, learning music, or being happy for a day or a lifetime; they also indicate the realization that life has a more complex and fulfilling meaning. For example, SKF noticed that the six-year-old SKB, who had a mouthful of bad

Revolution in the depths of the soul 103 teeth and clamored for Wi-Fi to play with his iPad as soon as he entered the cafe where we were seated, was much more sociable and affectionate than SKF was when he was a child—every time SKB left his grandparents' home and went back to his own, he would miss the children he met there for a long time. The older daughter, SKG, was inspired by her mother SKM, who was studying sociology, to learn about the past and present of her parents’ family by drawing a “family tree”. She found that just four generations later, her parents' families had more than 120 immediate family members. Not only did her maternal grandmother give birth to 12 children, but in mother SKM’s family, three relatives were inbred. Through home visits and telephone interviews, the 11-yearold learned about the many social and economic reasons for inbreeding, and her descriptions were even better than her mother SKM’s family sociology class. Of course, the younger generation, including SKF’s, who grew up before and after the reforms, are standard marginal people. On the one hand, they become spiritual guides for their parents and even grandparents to reshape themselves, and they also use a more modern consciousness to shape their children. On the other hand, since marginal people are not the ultimate state of spirit, the spiritual transformation of Chinese people, as Ambrose King said, will not be as simple as stepping out of tradition and into modernity (King, 1999: 71). The current generation of adults is also facing a cultural backlash from younger generations. The next question, then, may be: Where do we reshape our nation’s values and outlook on life?

The remodeling of values: where to start? In the course of writing this book, in 2009, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China and the 30th anniversary of the reform and opening-up, I wrote an article on the evolution of Chinese people’s values, life attitudes, and social mindset during the very important historical period of 60 years, especially the last 30 years (Zhou, 2009a, 2009b). In the article, subtitled “Another interpretation of China’s experience”, I wrote: After 30 years of social transformation, the values and social mentality of the Chinese people present a distinct “marginal” feature: The counterbalance of the tradition and the modern, the gap between the ideal and the reality, the confrontation between city and the countryside, the conflict between the east and the west. In general, Chinese values and social attitudes are becoming more rational and mature, more open and diverse, more and more active, and more globally aware. In a sense, this dramatic change in the social mindset of the Chinese people over the past 30 years is part of the “Chinese experience,” or rather, the “Chinese feeling,” which is gaining increasing attention. It is the subjective feelings and psychological accumulation brought by 30 years of reform and opening-up to the 1.3 billion Chinese people, and thus endowing the Chinese experience with complete value and significance on the spiritual level. (Zhou, 2009b)

104 Revolution in the depths of the soul Although such a description is somewhat emotional, its content is true and not fabricated. However, both articles obviously avoid or do not touch on the topic of how and where we should start to reshape our values. This kind of avoidance or neglect is not only determined by the content of the two papers, but also reflects the confusion of several generations of Chinese people, including myself. How on earth should we realize the modern transformation of Chinese people’s values? This is an old topic with a history of over a hundred years, but it has not been thoroughly solved until now. At the very beginning, from the defeat of the SinoJapanese naval war in 1891–1895, the pioneers of reform realized that if they only studied the West at the material and cultural level, they would inevitably fall to the point of “nothing can be done right unless the fundamentals are clearly understood” (Chinese History Society, 1957: 178), as Kang Youwei said. To this end, people like Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, and Lu Xun turn their criticism of traditional society to the institutional, cultural, and spiritual levels. On the basis of Liang Qichao’s “new citizen theory”, Chen Duxiu put forward the contemporary subject of rebuilding the value system of Chinese society (Mao, 1996: 301); the slogan “Autonomous rather than servile, progressive rather than conservative” was written in the “Launch letter” of the New Youth as one of the six great hopes to warn the youth. He believed that only when young people, as the fresh cells of society, have a new personality and new values can Chinese society be full of vitality. After the victory of the revolution in 1949, in order to build a socialist China, until the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the Chinese government advocated that young people should be “revolutionary and professional” new socialist people, and by setting such a specific person as Lei Feng as an example, they developed the values and codes of conduct the socialist “new people” should have. During the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, the empty hearts of the Chinese people were propped up by fanatical loyalty to their great leaders. After 1978, when Bei Dao shouted “I don’t believe it”, the collapse of values began to plunge the Chinese into the second and even more serious crisis of faith in modern times. After 1992, the transition from a planned economy to a market economy began in a quiet way to enable mainstream Chinese values to shift away from painful choices. The spirit of idealism disappeared, values became more and more diversified, and the trend of secularization and utilitarianism in the living world became more and more obvious. The concepts of time, efficiency, mobility, competition, and fairness that grew up simultaneously with the market economy have become increasingly prominent, and even the so-called “post-modern values with deconstructive significance” have emerged (Liao, 2006). Faced with the fragmentation and disorder in the field of values, it is obvious that the state and the ruling party also consider the importance of rebuilding the values consistent with the current social pattern. In 2006, the Sixth Plenary Session of the 16th Central Committee of the CPC put forward that: The guiding ideology of Marxism, the common ideal of socialism with Chinese characteristics, the national spirit with patriotism as the core and

Revolution in the depths of the soul 105 the spirit of the times with reform and innovation as the core, and the socialist concept of honor and disgrace constitute the basic content of the socialist core value system. (The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, 2006: 22) Further, the 18th Congress of the CPC in 2012 exhorted: “advocate prosperity, democracy, civilization, harmony, freedom, equality, justice and the rule of law; advocate patriotism, dedication, integrity and friendship, and actively cultivate and practice the core socialist values” (General office of the CPC Central Committee, 2013: 4). Although the ruling party has established the socialist core value system in the form of documents, it seems that the reconstruction of China’s social value has not been completed in the past century. First, because this value system was put forward only a few years ago, it is still in the process of development and improvement. For the whole society, there is still a process of implementation, practice, and acceptance. In addition, with the continuous expansion of the opening to the outside world and the indepth development of the socialist market economy, China’s social and economic components, organizational forms, employment patterns, interest relations and distribution patterns are increasingly diverse, and people’s ideological activities are increasingly independent, selective, changeable and diverse. (The State Council of the CPC Central Committee, 2004) Therefore, the established social mainstream values have not been formed, but are still in the process of selection and change. Secondly, in the transition period of China, the composition of Chinese culture is complicated, which mainly comes from three aspects: Marxism and Mao Zedong’s thoughts, traditional Chinese culture, and Western culture (Whyte, 1989; Ma, 1995). In the choice of realistic values, there will be the possibilities of having contradictions or even conflicts, taking the individual–collective (social) relationship as an example. Although a large proportion of the younger generation still agree that “collective interests are higher than individual interests”, since the reform and opening-up, it is clear that the lessons of the previous 30 years have made people agree more that “individual interests are the basis”.24 This shows that in real life, the young generation does not fully agree with mainstream values (Chen, 2009: 260). In this context, the answer to “Where to start to remodel our values?” can only refer to the value subject to start with to reshape the values of Chinese society. To this question, our answer is clear, that the reshaping of Chinese social values should start with the younger generation. This is because, first, the younger generation is the future of China. To realize the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, it is obviously necessary to cast a younger generation that can match the times. As Liang Qichao said more than 100 years ago: “If the young people are strong, China will be strong; … If the young people are best in the world, China will be the best in the world” (Liang, 1999: 411). Second, although Ingels said that one’s modernity

106 Revolution in the depths of the soul can change substantially in adulthood (Ingels & Smith, 1992: 403), most social scientists still believe that adolescence is an important time to forge values, because it is a period of socialization that sets the stage for a person’s growth. For example, Mannheim believed that the common experience of late adolescence defined the common political experience of a certain generation, and that people of different generations had different political attitudes (Mannheim, 1952). Chauvel also took the intergenerational conflict in France as the center of his research, and defined different social intergenerational divisions through different political and economic events experienced by individuals in the critical period of transition socialization (18–25 years old) (Chauvel, 2006). Third, in addition to the above two points, we need to emphasize that the construction of a value system that can truly support the great rejuvenation of a nation needs constant reflection, communication, and absorption, and history has proved that only the younger generation can complete the task of this era. First, we discuss the role of reflection or introspection in the reconstruction of the value system, which directly involves the analysis and dialogue of one’s I to me. We say that this kind of reflection is important because, without it, we will continue to indulge in the ignorance and self-appreciation of the defects of the original culture or behavior pattern, and of course there will be no desire or yearning for reconstruction. In The Pan-American Dream, Lawrence Harrison, a political scientist at Harvard University, writes about the difficulty of changing values and attitudes to life, because it requires the ability to objectively reflect and characterize the internal factors that touch on the most sensitive issues of self-image and self-esteem (Harrison, 1997: 261). Alex Inkeles, another Harvard professor and social psychologist who has championed modernization, agrees that the emphasis on continuous analysis of the self is the hallmark of a modern state; because of this kind of self-analysis, people are able to correct themselves (Inkeles, 1998: 83). Second, we discuss the role of communication or communication or interaction in the reconstruction of the value system, which involves the exchange of goods, information, and emotions that exist between different individuals, groups, and ethnic groups. The role of communication, or interaction, in social progress is well known. Without communication, no technology or invention would expand; without communication, there would be no China in the Tang dynasty; without communication, there would not have been the final collapse of traditional Chinese society in modern times and the emergence of a new China; without communication there would not even be human society. According to Simmel, continuous and stable communication or interaction is the basic condition for the formation of human society (Simmel, 1978: 175). Communication can not only exchange goods, information, and values, but also provide the possibility for comparison of people’s reflection. Effective communication between generations, especially between two or three generations in the period of great social transformation, can not only enhance the mutual understanding and emotions between generations, but also provide opportunities for the

Revolution in the depths of the soul 107 change of their own values, life attitudes, and behavior patterns through the understanding of another generation or generations. Finally, we discuss the role of absorption or learning in the reconstruction of the value system, which involves the recognition and borrowing of the virtues of other people or other cultures. As early as 1840, when Chinese culture was under the strong influence of the West and in crisis, Wei Yuan, Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang, Zuo Zongtang, and other Westernizers advocated “learning from the west to control it” and absorbing Western material civilization. After the defeat of the Sino-Japanese war, the reformist enlightenment thinkers such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao further advocated learning from the Western system and spiritual civilization. After the overthrow of the imperial system in 1911, Cai Yuanpei, Chen Duxiu, and Lu Xun, standard bearers of the new culture of the May Fourth Movement, advocated “copying” Western civilization—“copying” does not mean to accept everything, but “some used, some stored, some destroyed” (Lu, 2005: 41). The Chinese communists represented by Mao Zedong discovered Marxism from the West through “the firing of a cannon of the October Revolution” (Mao, 1967: 1360) and completed the founding of the People’s Republic of China on this basis. Similarly, the reform led by Deng Xiaoping pushed China to the peak of its national history through opening to the outside world, learning from the developed countries in the West, and relying on the increasingly strong tide of globalization. Let’s go back to daily life and see through a case study how the above reflection, communication, and absorption play a positive role in the reconstruction of Chinese people’s values, especially those of the younger generation. The case in question comes from a family in Beijing. Father BAF is nearly 60 years old and is engaged in the chemical industry. After graduating from high school in 1963, he responded to the national call and left Beijing to join the “third-line” construction in Sichuan. Like BAF, mother BAM did not go to college, but they were both outstanding students in high school. They did well in school but did not go to college, so it was natural that they hoped to realize their dreams in their son BAB. It should be said that, up to the second year of high school, BAB never failed his parents. He was not only obedient, but also extremely ambitious. He won first prizes in the National Mathematics Competition in his second and third years of high school, and two National Mathematical Olympiads. Everyone, including his parents, was convinced that he would be recommended to Peking University or Tsinghua University and would undoubtedly become a mathematician like Chen Jingrun. In 1997, however, an event changed his mind, or his previously held ideals or values, significantly: Well, I think the most significant change for me came in 1997, when I was selected to be an exchange student at a high school in Massachusetts. It was supposed to be easy for me because I could get top marks in math or physics at that great high school without much effort, but I wasn’t happy. Because I found that although I was good at math, my development was obviously partial, not as balanced and comprehensive as my American classmates. They are good at everything. They are active in class and have

108 Revolution in the depths of the soul strong practical ability. They are very interested in society and even politics. Every semester, the school offers 4–5 physical education classes for you to choose from, including track and field, basketball, tennis, and swimming. There are lots of courses, but you can choose from a wide range of options beyond the prescribed ones, and you can try them if you’re interested. No one is a nerd, so very few students wear glasses. I think the American family is also very democratic. For example, when I was boarding with an American family, the host never came to my room, and they gave me considerable freedom and looseness. In addition, their relationships are not as cold and selfish as we used to say. For example, once a lost dog came to the host’s house, and the hostess took the dog back according to the dog license. (BAB, 2004) Since returning from the United States, some changes have taken place in BAB. For example, he no longer simply pursued scores, especially in mathematics, and had no interest in participating in the Mathematical Olympiad competitions (although this means being directly recommended to Peking University and Tsinghua University). He wanted to be well-rounded, so he spent some time doing other things, including reading novels, playing ball games, and reading books in the humanities and social sciences, resulting in a decline in academic performance. Even when he slept at home, he started closing his bedroom door, saying he wanted to have his own living space. “He had a rebellious mentality,” BAM says. When he graduated from high school, although he was admitted to Tsinghua University with his good foundation, and later was admitted to the graduate school of his department after graduation, he frankly said to his parents, “I just want not to disappoint you.” So all the way to the second year of graduate school, when we interviewed him, he said to his parents, “You have to be prepared; maybe I’ll drop out one day.” Regarding the experience of the United States and the changes it has brought about, BAB and his parents do not share the same judgment. BAB believes that going to the United States for a year is certainly positive for one’s life, because it makes me realize that people should develop in a balanced way. If you are only better than others in one field, but have no common language with others in many other fields, or are much worse than others, it is a defect for a person. (BAB, 2004) His parents’ judgment is more complex. On the one hand, from the emotional point of view, BAF and BAM both regret having sent BAB out. BAF emphasizes that this is “not financial regret, not because he went to the United States to spend money, but because his learning motivation is decreased, or he will surely continue to study for a doctorate”. On the other hand, from a rational point of view, the parents also think that the change in their son may be

Revolution in the depths of the soul 109 reasonable, because if he can really develop in an all-round way, it will certainly be better than reading books, but “it is too risky to do so in China, where diploma is always emphasized” (BAM, 2004). There is nothing special about the case of BAB and his parents. It concerns only the outlook on life and values of an ordinary person. Of course, the experience of BAB will help us to reflect on the current Chinese education system and the college entrance examination system where “thousands of troops go through a single bridge”. Obviously, BAB has reflected on things, and under his influence his parents have also been touched to some extent. What we want to ask here is: Under what circumstances does this reflection, communication, and absorption occur? Obviously, without the experience of American life, without the observation and feeling of different cultures, even though BAB abhors being a mere “mathematical machine”, he will continue to walk along the road his parents expect. Thus it can be seen that a single case of reflection is not carried out in a vacuum. Reflection involves the analysis and dialogue between I and me, but the realization of such analysis and dialogue generally requires the following two basic conditions. Firstly, experiencing the destruction and strangling of tradition regarding human nature, especially the independent spirit of a human being; and secondly, and perhaps more importantly, accessing the outside world and being positive and open to it, being good at comparison and learning. The second point is perhaps more important because not everyone trapped by tradition is capable of critical and reflective thinking. Without a keen desire to change, to receive new information from the outside world, and to make active comparisons with care, a man will never know to his death what is restricting his spiritual world, nor will he be able to change from a spiritual dwarf to a spiritual elder. However, if the second condition is satisfied, even if there is no great cost in following tradition, some of the most critical people are likely to understand or perceive the remnants of the old forces in social life from the perception of change, and to reflect and criticize on it. In a sense, we say that the younger generation is often the first to reflect on or criticize the old traditions, not because they have suffered a harsh strangling, or are more or less isolated from the mainstream social system, but because they are most capable of communicating and absorbing, which makes it easier for them to acquire certain independent reflective and critical abilities. Not only BAB and his parents, but also the two crises of faith that Chinese society has experienced in modern times and the two great reflections that followed provide evidence for our above statement. In the preceding chapters of this book, we have pointed out many times that in the face of the great change in the late Qing dynasty and the early Republic of China, the people who made the first positive response were not those old people who had read a lot of poetry in the early Qing dynasty, but the “young China” praised by the reformist enlightenment thinkers. In Chapter 2 we made an incomplete list of the prescient young intellectuals of our time, and here we may add: Sun Yat-sen founded Xingzhong Hui (The Revive China Society) at the age of 28 (1894);

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Yang Dusheng, wrote for the New Hunan at the age of 31 (1902); Xu Xilin organized the Anqing Uprising at the age of 34 (1907); Huang Xing founded the Xinghua Club at the age of 30 (1904); Hu Hanmin participated in the establishment of Tongmeng Hui (The Chinese Revolutionary League) at the age of 26 (1905); Chen Duxiu founded the Anhui Slang Newspaper at the age of 25 (1904); Liu Shipei wrote for the Alarm Bell Daily at the age of 20 (1904); Wang Chingwei assassinated Regent Zaifeng at the age of 26 (1909); and Zou Rong wrote for the Revolutionary Army at the age of 18 (1903) (Chen, 2007: 51–52). From the April Fifth Movement in 1976 to the ideological liberation movement in 1978, the younger generation was the first to criticize and reflect on the “extreme left” ideological trend. Whether it is the generation of the “Tiananmen poem copy”; or Bei Dao, the author of “Answer”; or Lu Xinhua, the author of “Scar”; or even Hu Fuming, the author of “Practice is the only criterion for testing truth”, they are all young people by today’s standards. In this way, it can be clearly said that young people, with their sensitivity to change, natural interest in the outside world, and marginality in the social power system, are more likely to become independent and wise thinkers of the times. Therefore, in any age of radical change, a revolution in the soul will arise from them; in any society that craves change, the rebuilding of values and attitudes to life will also come from them.

Notes 1 After Huangfu Ping’s comments, many newspapers in Beijing published a series of critical articles, including “Can we ignore whether reform and opening-up is ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’?” (Current Trends and Thoughts, No. 2, 1991), “Reintroduction of whether reform and opening-up is ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’” (The Quest for Truth, No. 7, 1991), “Asking whether reform and opening-up is ‘capitalist’ or ‘socialist’” (Theoretical Front in Higher Education, No. 3, 1991), “Continue to promote reform and opening-up along the socialist direction” (Qiushi, No. 6, 1991), and “Three problems with current reform” (People’s Daily, September 2, 1991). The main purpose of these critical articles was to maintain the conservative and rigid planned economy system, oppose the socialist market economy, and regard the reform of the market economy as the restoration of capitalism. It was not until the publication of Deng Xiaoping’s “southern-tour speech” in 1992 that the “countercurrent” to negate reform and openingup was restrained. 2 On November 2, 1985, Song Longxiang, a young lecturer in the philosophy department of Nanjing University, under the pseudonym “Martin”, published an article entitled “Ten changes in contemporary economic research in China” in the Workers’ Daily, which was later reprinted, discussed, and criticized by many newspapers including Western media. Senior leaders including Hu Qiaomu, Deng Liqun, Bo Yibo, Hu Qili, Zhao Ziyang, and Hu Yaobang all pronounced on this. The issue was not calmed down until March of the next year. 3 In September 1984, the Economic Daily and other newspapers organized the “National symposium for young and middle-aged economic scientists” in Moganshan, Hangzhou. Hua Sheng, He Jiacheng, and others put forward the idea of a dualtrack price system reform, which was reported to the central government by Zhang Jinfu, then state councilor, and adopted by the central government. The dual-track idea was controversial at the very beginning. With the deepening of reform and the accumulation of contradictions, it became infamous in the late 1980s. However, after

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the 1990s, its reputation suddenly rose, which caused a “competition for invention” between Hua Sheng and Zhang Weiying. In 2014, He Jiacheng became one of the senior officials at the provincial and ministerial level who fell from power after the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), adding a new footnote to this issue. Strictly speaking, in the course of 30 years of changing sexual attitudes, in addition to Wang Xiaobo and Li Yinhe, two of my colleagues, Professor Pan Suiming of Renmin University of China and Professor Liu Dalin of Shanghai University, also made indelible contributions: Pan Suiming, after the Mysterious Fire—A History of the Sociology of Sex, shifted his study of sex to “red-light districts”. Existence and Absurdity—An Investigation of China’s Underground Sex Industry and Survival and Experience—A Follow-up Investigation of an Underground “Red Light District” were first-class sociological field investigations, but they were also destined to become the tools for people to desensitize to sex and even the sex trade. Liu Dalin, a scion of a prominent family in Yangzhou, displayed a serious “clinical spirit” when he wrote An Examination of Sexual Life in China and collected ancient Chinese sex objects for his sex museum, which often silenced those defenders who had the urge to criticize or rebuke. During the April Fifth Tiananmen Movement in 1976, faced with such poems as “Written by Jinshui Bridge” and “Denouncing Deng Xiaoping”, written by the respected old poets Tian Jian and Zang Kejia at the moment when Deng Xiaoping was being knocked down again, the poems written by the younger generation who were risking death seem more precious and full of vitality: “China is no longer the China it used to be,/The people are not stupid./The feudal society of the Qin dynasty is gone forever./We believe in Marxism-Leninism./Go to hell with those scholars who castrate Marxism-Leninism!/We want true Marxism” (Tong, 1978: 282). The reason why we say that the progress and rebellion of contemporary youth arose from this is because, through the “Tiananmen poems”, the younger generation “expressed the break with ‘the eight-leg essay of the gang of four’ in a fresh and sharp way. The break came at the height of cultural domination” (Xie, 1995). To this end, Ai Qing wrote in a less poetic way in a poem entitled “On the crest of a wave”: “If one asks,/What happened to the ‘cultural revolution’?/The answer is the emergence of a new generation of young people in China/After paying too much!” (Ai, 1979: 370). As early as 1948, Ren Bishi, then vice chairman of the CPC Central Committee, promised in his political report on the “Outline of China’s Land Law” that landlords would be deprived of their land for five years and rich peasants for three years, returning the land to the working people. In 2006, Zha Jianying wrote in Bei Dao’s “Notes of interview” about the thrill she felt when she first read “The answer”, which I quote below; “I will never forget the shock of the moment when I first read this poem. Only those who truly believe can feel such shock” (Zha, 2006: 67). Her words do reveal, acutely, the profound disappointment and shock of a generation that once believed so much in its own commander, so much in the meaning of his violent revolution. Bei Dao’s poem, titled “The answer”, appeared in the March issue of Poetry magazine in 1979. In fact, before it was officially published, it was widely circulated among young people. It reflected the disillusionment and disdain of the generation after the Cultural Revolution for the political autocracy and political oppression in the “ten-year catastrophe”. As far as I am concerned, I first heard this poem in the winter holiday of February 1979. That afternoon, several students of grade 77 who had been admitted to the university at the same time had a party. On the lawn on the island in the middle of Nanjing Mochou Lake, under the warm winter sun, Zou Jin, who studied in the Chinese department of Jilin University and belonged to the “Red

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Revolution in the depths of the soul Heart” poetry club with Xu Jingya and Wang Xiaoli, read aloud this poem which was refreshing to us at that time. For the next 30 years, “The answer” remained the spiritual soliloquy of our generation. On January 17, 2010, when I was attending the planning and press conference of “If you are the one” program of Jiangsu TV in the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Wangfujing, Beijing, a meeting for educational fund donation was being held next door. I witnessed the hand-written “The answer” of Bei Dao in December 2008 (a gift to Xu Xiaoping of the New Oriental) sold for 80,000 RMB. This partly reflects that after 30 years, “The answer” still has great charm in the hearts of our generation, and is its eternal spiritual scale. In addition to Head Teacher and Scar, the main representative works of “scar literature” also include Zhang Kangkang’s The Right to Love, A Cheng’s The King of Chess, Li Ping’s When the Sunset Disappears, Shi Tiesheng’s My Distant Qingping Bay, Han Shaogong’s The Distant Tree, Wang Anyi’s The End of This Train, Ye Xin’s Waste Time, Liang Xiaosheng’s Chronicle of the Great Northern Wilderness and A Snowstorm Tonight, and Xu Naijian’s Bai Yang’s “Pollution”. In fact, in a broad sense, “scar literature” can also include all kinds of literature works, including novels, films, and plays, which make accusations of the Cultural Revolution and provide eulogies of humanity. Among them, the more famous are Zhang Yang’s novel The Second Handshake, Bai Hua’s film script Bitter Love (Sun and Man), Zong Fuxian’s drama In Silent Place and the poem “General, you can’t do this”, Su Shuyang’s drama Tree of Red Hearts, and Sha Yexin’s drama If I Am True. Morris Dickstein, a professor at Columbia University, wrote aptly in The Gate of Eden—American Culture in the Sixties: “Every age tends to cultivate its own principles of decay and nurture a spirit that will eventually overthrow it” (Dickstein, 1985: 54). In fact, the “Xidan democracy wall” closed earlier than Today. When China Youth magazine was republished in September 1978, it was immediately banned under the instructions of Wang Dongxing, then vice chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, so the unconvinced young people put the issue of China Youth on the low wall in Xidan, expressing their anger in their own way. For more than a year after that, the Xidan democracy wall was filled with posters calling for the elimination of the remnants of feudal autocracy, and for democracy and freedom of speech, including those overly radical manuscripts calling for political democratization written by Ren Wanding and Wei Jingsheng. At this point, the Xidan democracy wall came to an end. On December 6, 1979, Beijing banned the posting of large-character posters on the Xidan wall and other places (see The Research Office of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League, 1979). “Pan Xiao” was the pseudonym used for the article, whose real authors were Ma Lizhen and Ma Xiaodong, editors of China Youth magazine. They wrote about the general confusion and depression experienced by the post-Cultural Revolution generation, based on youth symposiums held at various government offices, schools, factories, and shops in Beijing. The prototypes of the main character of the article were Huang Xiaoju, a young worker of the Beijing Fifth Sweater Factory, and Pan Hui, a sophomore in Beijing Economic College (Peng, 2008; Editorial Office of China Youth, 2000: 3–30). This outlook on life or values does produce a certain individualistic orientation, so that people like Zhao Lin and others who participated in the discussion simply said, “only the ego is absolute”, “the individual is the center and foundation of the world”, “the ego is a grand and profound temple”, and “all the concepts of totalism are the result of the individual soul being distorted and individual essence being alienated”, etc. In 2000, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Pan Xiao discussion, China Youth magazine held a commemorative activity and published a collection of essays

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titled Pan Xiao Discussion—The First Love of the Mind of Chinese Youth (Nankai University Press, 2000) after the meeting. At a 1986 concert in Beijing in honor of the international year of peace, newly minted Cui Jian took to the stage at the Beijing Workers’ Stadium to perform “Nothing”, a song that would become as iconic in song territory as the poems of Bei Dao. In “I used to ask,/When would you come with me …”, China’s first rock singer was born. There are many legends about Yuan Geng. As early as 1981, he put forward in Shekou a view somewhat similar to Weber’s capitalist spirit: “Time is money and efficiency is money.” In February 1987, a year before the Shekou incident, he said in the face of his critics that “people should be free from fear” and “in a word, a society with fear is not the one we yearn for” (Chen, 2008: 69). In Qu Xiao’s speech, restrained students at Southwest Jiaotong University posed the same combative question: “You just said that the student you came into contact with was just a fool. It’s a pity that you have not come into contact with a truly insightful student of the student movement, and we urge you to know more about them.” “You always teach others that it ‘should’ be this way and ‘should’ be that way, but I don’t feel a sense of looseness and openness in your mind. Don’t you think your ideas are only marketable in a place like Southwest Jiaotong University where ideological and political work is stiff?” (Wang, 1993: 390). In June 1991, New Century, a magazine sponsored by Hunan province, the hometown of Mao Zedong, published an article entitled “Perspective on Mao Zedong fever”, which summarized it in five points: college students learn Selected Works of Mao Zedong; Mao Zedong’s documentary works quietly appeared; people began wearing Mao Zedong badges again in the streets; there was singing of the old red songs; portraits of leaders began selling again (Lin, 1991). Although Cui Jian does not want people to “see him as a figure with a certain political inclination” (Zhao, 1992: 11), a series of popular rock music like “I want to leave,/I want to exist,/I want to die and start over” and “I used to ask,/When would you come with me,/ But you always laughed at me,/For having nothing at all …” really expresses the bitterness and hesitation experienced by the younger generation after 1989. The word “kara” comes from Japan, which means “empty” in Japanese, and “oke” is an abbreviation for the English word orchestra, which originally means “an unaccompanied band”. It originated from Japan in the 1970s and was introduced to China from Taiwan in the 1980s. In addition to the present Hongqiao town, the original Hongqiao district also included several surrounding towns, and was much larger than the present Hongqiao town. Because the land was poor and the population was so large in Wenzhou, many farmers around Wenzhou in the 1960s and 1970s took up maltose, going to cities in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Suzhou, and Wenzhou city to sell maltose to residents, especially hungry children, in exchange for chicken feathers, which were used to fertilize the fields. This was not only a kind of wandering, but also the beginning of the Wenzhou farmers’ modernity—to improve their knowledge and enhance their mobility and risk awareness. Since 1991, a variety of surveys on the values of young people for the past 20 years have shown that, on the one hand, they still have considerable identification with the collectivism advocated by the mainstream value system. On the other hand, when it comes to the choice between individual and collective, individual and society, they will no longer disregard individual interests (Lu, 1991: 137–143; Xi, 1999: 16–18; Yang, 2008: 47–48).

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For as the children of pioneers had no access to the memories which could still move their parents to tears, the young today cannot share their parents’ responses to events that deeply moved them in the past. But this is not all that separates the young from their elders. Watching, they can see that their elders are groping, that they are managing clumsily and often unsuccessfully the tasks imposed on them by the new conditions. They have no firsthand knowledge of the way their parents lived far across the seas, of how differently wood responded to tools, or land to hoe. They see that their elders are using means that are inappropriate, that their performance is poor, and the outcome very uncertain. The young do not know what must be done, but they feel that there must be a better way. Margaret Mead

A heterogeneous world and diversified choices Applaud it or lament it, as we have already stated in Chapter 1, there is no denying that Chinese society is undergoing a dramatic transformation. In 1966, during the period of the Cultural Revolution in mainland China, Ambrose King, who was later called “the pioneer of modern Chinese studies” by Liu Xiaofeng (Liu, 1994), borrows the findings of political scientist F. W. Riggs on transitional societies gleaned from empirical studies of Thailand and the Philippines (Riggs, 1961) to explain Taiwan, the specific Chinese society in which the transformation first appeared. He found that the “heterogeneity”, “formalism”, and “overlap” described by Riggs “are also characteristics of China’s transitional society” (King, 1999: 73). The so-called “heterogeneity” refers to the coexistence of different or even disparate phenomena in a transforming society. Its more positive expression is “pluralism”. Take Taiwan in 1966 as an example. Economically, the self-sufficient economic system coexists with the market system; in politics, the concept of “equipping people with monarch and master” coexists with the concept of “democracy and equal rights”; culturally, Westernization coexists with conservatives and, in society, the traditional family system coexists with the modern society (King, 1999: 74). In fact, the heterogeneity of the transitional society observed by Ambrose King and even Riggs was detected by Lu Xun, who was keener than DOI: 10.4324/9780429447679-4

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others by nature, more than 90 years ago, when the initial transformation of Chinese society towards modernity took place: The state of Chinese society can be said to condense centuries into a single moment: From pinus tabulaeus to electric lights, from unicycles to aircraft, from dart guns to machine guns, from not “talking about legal principles” to protection, from “eating flesh and bedding skin” to humanitarianism, from meeting the corpse and worshiping snakes to aesthetic education for religion, they exist side by side. (Lu, 2005: 360) We have seen that the society that best illustrates this heterogeneity is neither China in 1919 nor Taiwan across the strait in 1966, but the mainland after 1978. Sun Liping also observed that: In a fractured society like ours, in different parts of our society, things that are from almost entirely different times, coexist—from existentialism, Nietzscheism, post-modernism, to consumerism, civic culture, Hong Kong and Taiwan TV dramas, to farmers’ local entertainment and “feudal superstition”. (Sun, 2003: 12) The reason is very simple. Internally, as we said in Chapter 1, after nearly 30 years of isolation, the reforms advocated by Deng Xiaoping suddenly made an otherwise closed society very open; externally, the wave of globalization after the 1980s made China’s integration with the world comprehensive and immediate for the first time. Whether it is Taiwan in the 1960s, which is what King discussed, or the mainland after 1980, which we are talking about, China in transition is also characterized by “formalism”, a disconnect between “what should be” and “what is”.1 For example, traffic rules are supposed to maintain traffic order, with red lights stopping cars and pedestrians from crossing; and zebra crossings are convenient for pedestrians, but in transitional China, the complex traffic system and even the perfect equipment—the traffic control equipment in Chinese cities is now worldclass—cannot fully assume the function of maintaining traffic order. In 2009, a real estate manager in Nanjing hit and killed a pedestrian while driving drunk, and a second-generation rich man in Hangzhou raced his car through a zebra crossing in a downtown area, causing a fatal accident. And major traffic accidents like these happen all over the country from time to time. Traffic rules, as King puts it, are just a set of words in black and white (King, 1999: 74), and are a good example of formalism. In fact, in China, the formalist disconnection between “what should be” and “what is” is by no means limited to traffic rules, and almost all fields of social and economic life show the characteristics of formalism to varying degrees. However, this formalism itself is not only negative, it also has a positive function in the face of the old norms. For example, in the early 1990s, Deng Xiaoping advocated

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“Just do it and don’t talk about it” in the face of the fierce question: “Do you belong to capitalism or socialism?”; that is, to allow the “what is” of the real economy and the “what should be” of the rules of the planned economy to disconnect. In a few words, make the rules redundant. Formalism shows that Chinese people, who are in a transition from tradition to modernity, are in a marginal state that has not yet been consistent in knowledge and practice. They know or are told what to do (“what should be”), but in action (“what is”) they still go their own way. Finally, corresponding to heterogeneity and formalism, China in transition also manifests the so-called overlapping characteristics of tradition and modernity. Old institutions and new schemes overlap, old customs and new fashions overlap, and old ideas and new vocabulary overlap. Although this mixture of new and old styles and the overlap of modern and traditional ideas may be a prominent feature of the transitional society (Riggs, 1961: 12), and it provides the possibility for the transformation of social and personal lives, it also makes the individuals or social groups living in it “at a loss” or “unstable”. The phenomenon of the whole society is that every kind of people have more or less “out of line” or “uneasy” behavior, and every kind of organization is more or less overstepping boundaries (King, 1999: 77). In his lifetime, Fei Xiaotong took traditional Chinese society as the model, and envisaged that a beautiful society could be built in today’s China where everyone “finds his place and makes his life” (Fei, 1993). Now it seems that as long as society is not relatively fixed during the transformation, or that the Chinese people cannot solve the problem of “drift” from the spirit, the realization of this ideal will still be some time away. If you do not involve too much emotion, just as you can regard spiritual drift as spiritual transformation, you can also call the above heterogeneity “diversity”, the formalism “irregularity”, and the overlap “coexistence” and mutual transgression. Although more and more people begin to realize that heterogeneity, formalism, and overlap are the inevitable characteristics of a transitional society, people of different generations have different reactions to the same transformation. Generally speaking, transformation and the characteristics of transformation mentioned above bring discomfort, confusion, and even anxiety to the older generation, but bring excitement, opportunity, and choice to the younger generation. Since there is not only one way to live in the world, there is no reason for parents or teachers to make the younger generation take the path they have taken; choice is not only a right, it is even a necessary ability for modern people, because at the moment, there is not a single set of values or attitude to life in the world that would avoid the opposition and conflict of values. In addition to defending one’s own values in the face of those of other people, or other groups of values, we should pursue what Daisaku Ikeda called “symbiotic moral qualities” (Ikeda, 1993), or “pluralistic values” as Fei Xiaotong called them; that is to say, “each has its own beauty, and respects others’ choice of beauty. When we all coexist with each other in harmony, the world will become great” (Fei, 2001: 302).

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Except for writers born in the 1980s, like Han Han and Gong Xiaobing, who face up to the authority of the adult world through the Internet,2 in ordinary daily life, most young people have not yet developed the ability to “challenge” or confront their elders directly. Wise and tolerant elders like Daisaku Ikeda and Fei Xiaotong are even rarer. Under normal circumstances, in the social and public sphere, as Wu Xiaoying said, “the mainstream discourse still treats young people as restless rebels to prevent and control … Keep a tight grip on the discourse and keep young people out of it” (Wu, 2006). In family life, parents, especially those who have been deprived of selfambition by the times, also hope that their children will grow up on their planned path, becoming copies of themselves or at least their ideal, rather than “alternatives” in their eyes. In this way, in the face of this heterogeneous world and diversified choices, young people who could have made themselves according to their own ideals and all the opportunities given in this era were met with resistance from parents and teachers before they entered society. And so, one conflict comes after another: My life is like shooting a play. There are so many directors and editors who control the emotions of my life in their own language. They say their purpose is to cultivate the country’s talent, but I don’t know if they really think so. When I was very, very young, I listened to them, right or wrong, and it was called “education.” It is this kind of “education” that was instilled into my body, regardless of whether I accepted it or not, I had to listen to it. This is called authority! The word “rebellion” was not learned at that time, but obedience was learned at birth, because mother is the synonym of the word, and the child has to listen to everything his mother says. So when my mother told me to obey her, I did. I’m glad that my childhood education didn’t distort my humanity. Maybe they also knew that their job was to nurture talent, not to make money. I can’t thank them enough for that. After having listened to them for so many years, my feelings clearly begin to change. Maybe it’s the beginning of rebellion, but I’d say it’s a sign of sanity. Their ugly faces gradually come out. They will tell the conference that students should not fall in love, but forget that some of them had become parents in high school. When they hear the students down there talking about how a girl looks, they would scold, “What are you guys thinking all day!”, but forget that they were in groups discussing issues of the same nature, even more deeply … Maybe I went too far, because if you think about it, it’s not their fault, but the fault of the education system. Those of them who are young, and not so long into this business, and whose minds are not completely corrupted, can still communicate with us. We also sense a difference between them and the older teachers, but I don’t know what their future will be like. (Wei, 2006: 15) This quotation is taken from the composition of Wei Zhuolin, a second-year student at Yongning High school in Nanning, Guangxi. The composition, entitled “Embattled”, uses the song of the same name by Jay Chou, a Hong Kong and

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Taiwan pop star popular among young people.3 In addition to the first part, where Wei Zhuolin used Jay Chou’s lyrics to express his dissatisfaction with being controlled by the whole adult world, including his parents and teachers, at the end of the article he also used some other lyrics to describe the whole process from obedience in ignorance to the formation of rebellion in adulthood: I’ve been here for more than a decade. I’ve been listening to you from a young age, But today I use what I have learned from you to argue against you. Perhaps I should reflect on why this is so, If you think you are a good teacher, Please continue to teach in this way. In fact, as a sophomore in high school, Wei Zhuolin made an excellent reflection on the current education system and intergenerational relations, because faced with the perplexity of parents and teachers, he borrowed Jay Chou’s lyrics to make a final farewell to the older generation: The last thing I want to say: I am still me, and no one can change me, though I know that many archers want to shoot me down when I climb up, and when I get to the top of the hill, no one can hurt me. These archers have worked hard on your hand, and I will regard you as an elder, for I am a young man, but we cannot be friends. Come on, wagging dogs! We’re not friends, but you can still be my dogs. (Wei, 2006) Although society has become heterogeneous and diverse, there is still not enough understanding and tolerance among the members of its different sections and groups. Wei Zhuolin’s “Embattled” soon put him in battle with the adult world: his Chinese teacher judged the composition with the lowest score of 26 points because of its “extreme and vulgar language”. His middle school sent copies of the composition to all teachers as a negative example of “insulting” and “disrespecting” teachers. And the author himself “voluntarily” conducted a self-review for his teachers because of the pressure of expulsion or forced transfer. In her analysis of the case, Wu Xiaoying said the uproar over a student’s essay was because the school teachers “were not aware of the background relationship between the composition and popular lyrics” (Wu, 2006). But I think that in addition to teachers’ unfamiliarity with popular songs and students’ lack

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of proper discretion—they lack sufficient vigilance and respect for the general banter used in songs to refer to specific elders—it is also the fact that for the first time the adult world is facing a sharp challenge from the younger generation, and they inevitably overreact. And the challenge is not only outrageous, but it hits home. First, for a long time, our education mode has always been based on indoctrination, and the purpose of indoctrination is to make the younger generation obey and teach them to submit to the authority of their elders. Although the May Fourth Movement is nearly a century old, the problems that that generation wanted to solve have been delayed till now. Second, teachers and even parents cannot accept the principle of universalism in their daily life. They do one thing for themselves, another for their children or students, reminiscent of the absurd joke of the opium-smoking father who tearfully persuaded his son to give up smoking. Third, because of the lack of effective educational means, teachers can only use the means of driving a wedge between parents and students to unite the parents into punishing the students, thus passing over the responsibility of teaching to the parents, leaving the students in an “embattled” situation. Fourth, while young teachers still understand students, and their minds have not been completely corrupted, they may fall back “like the old ones”—suggesting that there is something wrong with the educational system, not with the individual (Wu, 2006). Finally, if the older generation is not aware of their problems, then they will “continue their education in this way”, while the younger generation will not change themselves and will continue to “climb up” in life according to their ideals. In fact, as we will discuss in Chapter 4 of the second volume of this book, if intergenerational conflicts and confrontations occur between parents and children who are related by blood, not only will there be no tension in these cases, but there may be some warmth. Clearly, in today’s society, as successive generations of living beings, when the offspring take more care of their parents’ feelings and selfesteem, then parents will appreciate the challenges their children bring, even if they are confused and bitter—it is, after all, another self, another alienated but better self. Remember the story that Fei Xiaotong told us briefly in Chapter 1. Although Nietzsche was deeply attached to his mother for many years, he was always troubled by his inability to listen to her advice to convert him to God. Until one day when he passed by the bustling market, and saw a string of broken hydrogen balloons rising from the peddler’s hands, Nietzsche realized the inevitability of a parting of the ways with his mother, and the philosophical lunatic who later was the first to shout “God is dead” muttered softly to himself: “That which will fly, flies at last” (Fei, 1998: 210). You will see more parents and children facing a break in their behavior patterns, not only no longer full of disdain, antagonism, and hostility, but also with more tolerance, understanding, and appreciation, and that’s what we’re talking about in terms of cultural reverse and its possibilities.

The pursuit of the “high”: living through expression The heterogeneity and diversity of this era have created a colorful and transient society. The diversity and variability in this society often make a sociologist who studies and observes it feel that he lives outside it.

120 The break of behavioral modes Such exclamations come not only from rational thinking, but also from emotional experience. On August 24, 2005, a Wednesday afternoon, a reporter from the Wenhui Daily in Shanghai called me on my mobile phone, hoping that I, a “social psychologist”, would offer my opinion on the tidal wave caused by Super Voice Girl on the social landscape. To be honest, when the reporter asked me the question, I thought of “super girls” or “super women students”. At that moment, I still had no idea which girls might be called “super” in recent times, so I excused myself by saying, “Oh, sorry, I’m in a meeting, I don’t have a particular opinion about super girls.” After turning off the mobile phone, I asked Professor Zhang Hongyan who was attending the meeting what Super Voice Girl was. He, who was always well-informed, scoffed, “Are you a sociologist who doesn’t even know Super Voice Girl?” After detailed questioning, I found out that Super Voice Girl had nothing to do with psychic abilities, but had a lot to do with social psychology. Then I asked, “When will there be more broadcasts?” He answered, “Friday night, the final.” Two days later, on the evening of August 26, I watched the final of 2005 Mengniu Yogurt Happy Chinese Super Voice Girl on Hunan satellite TV, and discovered that Super Voice Girl was a TV “talent show” created in 2004. I also discovered three ordinary girls—Li Yuchun, Zhou Bichang, and Zhang Liangying—who had become very popular. The Super Voice Girl contest attracted 150,000 female contestants nationwide, tens of millions of text messages to vote, and 400 million viewers to watch the final alone (it ranked first among all programs in the country at the same time). Advertisers were offering prices of up to 112,500 yuan per ten seconds, while the relevant pages on Google are 1,160,000 (Zhang & Xue, 2006: 2). Like so many new things after the reform and opening-up in 1978, Super Voice Girl is a clone of Western culture. The only difference is that because of openness and globalization the “time difference” between Chinese entertainment programs and the world is getting shorter and shorter. In 2001, British producer Simon Fuller, who created super idol groups such as the Spice Girls, teamed up with Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) producer Simon Cowell to create a music talent show called Pop Idol for Fremantle Media. This program was a rare opportunity for many “Cinderellas” and “frog princes” to show their talent and singing voice, which offered a shortcut to those who made it to the end in a “presidential election style” final. When the first season of Pop Idol was broadcast on ITV, the average audience per episode reached 13 million, and every time the show was broadcast, the whole country was full of people (Miao et al., 2006: 216). The following year, Fox picked the right moment, spending nearly $100 million to buy the rights to Pop Idol from Mr. Fremantle and hiring Simon Cowell as host. Because of his fame, Cowell invited a worldclass panel of judges for American Idol, including producer Randy Jackson, who had worked with international stars including Celine Dion and Madonna, and Paula Abdul, the Grammy Award winner and Hollywood star. The show attracted nearly 2.7 million viewers in its first two hours, making it the toprated program of its kind in the United States. With 5.6 million viewers a week of all ages, Fox beat CBS and NBC, two of the biggest media companies, to

The break of behavioral modes 121 become the most-watched reality show in the United States for six years (Ayres, 2010). Simon Cowell’s performance as host of American Idol is even more remarkable. He was called a “villain-like judge” by the media and the public for his harsh and unrelenting comments on the contestants’ songs, which made the contestants and the audience have a love–hate relationship with him. The successful cloning of Pop Idol in more than 30 countries, especially the United States, soon attracted the attention of Chinese TV people. In 2003, Hunan TV, which is known for being avant-garde in the industry, imitated Pop Idol and American Idol and created Super Voice Boy. In the second year, there was Super Voice Girl. In the following years, due to the huge success of Super Voice Girl, the talent show in the Chinese TV industry turned into a flood: My Style My Show, Dream China, Come on, Boys!, Absolute Singing, Angel Mission, Shining New Anchor, and Dream People in the Red Mansion and other programs came out one by one (Zheng et al., 2008: 17–18). In the end, the State Administration of Radio and Television (SARFT) had to issue documents to control all kinds of talent shows. Super Voice Girl advocated “prioritizing singing” and “singing for the sake of singing”, and provided free entry for anyone who liked to sing, regardless of age, singing technique, geographical location, or appearance. It turned out that applicants did range in age from 4 to 89, whether it was the actual contestants or the powerful and larger “fans” of these “super girls”. Most of them were young women between the ages of 15 and 25, who, in 2004, were exactly the so-called “post-80s generation”. In other words, they were the first generation to grow up after the reform and opening-up, the direct beneficiaries of the transformation of Chinese universities from elite education to mass education, the beneficiaries of great changes in China’s material life due to its social GDP having soared over the past 30 years. It was also the first generation of only children since the one-child policy was introduced in the 1980s. The period described in this book concerns the whole social environment in which the post-80s and even post-90s people grew up. To sum up the basic characteristics of this era in the simplest language: it concerns the rapid economic growth of more than 40 years, which provides, especially for the younger generation in the cities, material living conditions that their parents, especially their grandparents, could not even imagine. The opening-up of Chinese society, especially the wave of globalization following it, has immersed them in the consumerist thought of “I consume therefore I am”, while broadening their horizon. With the improvement of teaching standards and the popularization of university education, they have received unprecedented educational benefits on the one hand, but, on the other hand, they are suffering from endless examinations, piano lessons, art lessons, and Mathematical Olympiad classes. The centralization of family, the one-child policy, and the unitization of housing, together with the popularization of electronic media—from ever-changing televisions to computers, mobile phones (including WeChat), MP3s, MP4s, digital cameras, digital camcorders, and iPads—has not only changed their kinship and social relations, but also changed their communication and interaction mode.

122 The break of behavioral modes They are a single, solitary generation, and a generation of spiritual self-talk and self-growth. A new era, a new way of life, has created a new generation. This generation is beginning to be described as the “egoistic generation”. “As the only child of the first generation, their self-centered thinking that spreads to others has been internalized since childhood, which becomes the biggest and most fundamental difference between them and the previous generation with a strong sense of collectivism” (Zheng et al., 2008: 142). In fact, the individualism of the post-80s and post-90s generation has not only been created by the era they live in, but also, to some extent, by their parents’ and grandparents’ disgust and rebellion against the so-called collectivism of before 1978, which completely sacrificed the individual. Back in 1994, before the post-80s generation grew up, anthropologists pointed out that Chinese children were at risk of being “spoiled” (Wu, 1994). Everything that parents and grandparents lost in their own lives, from ideals, personal prospects, school education, to pianos, drawing boards, toys, clothes, and food, is now being poured onto children in multiple ways and even tenfold. The tolerance and indulgence of the parents, especially the grandparents, has not only formed children’s characteristics of self-concern and contempt for authority, but also developed their independent, confident, and decisive conduct. Their parents and grandparents, who largely honed their subservience during the political storms of pre-1978, find their children with a distinctly different, if not necessarily good or bad, style. In their values, the self stands in the front row, while collectivity retreats to the second line. Their code of conduct is “show yourself”, do not be an “introvert”, which is a traditional Chinese virtue. Their attitude towards life is that they are spontaneous and do not suppress themselves, which is what Super Voice Girl” called “Just sing as you like”. Even if no one cheers, it will not affect their emotional investment, because what they pursue is the experience of life, of “being high”, of being “Just for yourself!” One of the details of the 2005 Super Voice Girl competition shows that the post-80s generation is completely different from those born in the 1950s, 1960s, and even 1970s. Because it advocated “Just sing as you like” and hundreds of millions of people were crazy about it, and the closer the program got to the final countdown, the more powerful the pressure from all walks of life and public opinion became. Contestants’ costumes, make-up, songs, and dances began to be disciplined by organizers or the adult world. The program asked contestant He Jie to dye her colorful hair back to black, but she refused. “My hair is my own. I can do what I want, and you have no right to interfere. Neither the contract nor the rules of the game require it.” Considering that for thousands of years, the “whatever you want” behavioral logic of Chinese people could only exist in two places—in the heart and in the hands of privileged people (New Weekly, 2010: 94)—today, these ordinary post-80s girls are subverting that logic in their own way, so you can understand why Time Asia graciously gave Li Yuchun the cover of its special issue that October and listed her as one of the top 25 “Asia’s Heroes” of 2005. In the words of Time magazine,

The break of behavioral modes 123 “super girls” challenge traditional Chinese norms of behavior, and they “shock more than themselves and are undoubtedly China’s new idols”. If you think that today’s young people, the so-called post-80s or post-90s generation, are just the generation that can sing and show, think again. In fact, a variety of talent show stages is just one of the countless shows by which they show themselves: their main “show” in social life. There, they not only show in a refreshing way their behavior patterns which differ from those of others, their parents and grandparents in particular, but they also set an example for the latter to lead in a changing society. Their behaviors undoubtedly manifest social significance, and its reversal, to all their elders. GEG is a post-80s girl who grew up in Wuhan and moved to Guangzhou with her parents. In 1999, when I was visiting with Professor Elisabeth Perry Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies, I was living on 11 Knapp Street in the small town of Somerville, about 15 minutes from the University; her parents GEF and GEM shared the floor with me. GEF is less than ten years older than me, and is of the so-called “old three-grade students” who graduated from junior high school before the Cultural Revolution. Because his father died when he was 13, it was hard for his mother to raise four children on a monthly salary of 47 CNY. So after graduating from junior high school, GEF had to give up his dream of going to university and went to a technical school, after which he worked as a sailor on the turbulent Yangtze River for nearly ten years. Later, he was admitted to the philosophy department of Wuhan University in 1978, and moved to Guangzhou after his PhD. In 2000, shortly after returning from a visit to the United States, GEF became president of the local academy of social sciences. GEM, who is the same age as GEF, only went to junior high school before going to the countryside, where he has been a factory worker. Born in 1981, GEG is much luckier than her parents. She inherits the wisdom of her father and the shrewdness of her mother, and grew up in a privileged environment. In 1998, the September when GEM and GEF visited the United States, GEG was admitted to the law school of Peking University, which is the dream of millions of children. In May 2002, GEG, who had been accepted to graduate school at an American university, decided that she would leave China and needed to know more about her home country, so in her spare time after finishing her graduation thesis, she decided to go to Changping county on the outskirts of Beijing to investigate grass-roots social organizations in the countryside. This concerned: “What help do village committees and Communist Youth League Organizations have for delinquent youth?” and “How do they treat the deviant behavior of delinquent youth?” Before the trip, GEG made a research plan and exchanged ideas with her father, who was engaged in social science research, over the phone. She promised to stay in the countryside for only one night, and then went to Changping village alone by bus. In the Changping rural area, GEG visited old farmers, visited the village Party Branch secretary, found the Communist Youth League organization, and, of course, she had a panel discussion with a diverse group of her peers.

124 The break of behavioral modes Although only 22 years old, her survey was well-designed to take into account the impact of overall social change on rural society, especially among teenagers, including the weakening of village-level organizations, the difficulty of village management caused by the increasing mobility of farmers, the behavior disorder caused by the change of values, and the bad influence of parents’ working outside on children’s discipline. Because she found problems in the countryside more complex than she had expected, the two-day and overnight investigation was extended to four days and three nights. In 2002, mobile phones were not as popular as they are now, so she could not inform her parents in time, and her bold “discretionary” behavior caused serious anxiety among her parents: Because she had agreed to stay in the country for only one night, I called her dorm the next evening, and she wasn’t back yet. The third day I tried again and she still wasn’t back. Then the fourth day. Her mother and I began to worry. Considering that the social order was bad then, it is conceivable how anxious we were as our daughter went to the countryside alone for three days without any news. On the third night I stayed awake all night, calling first the law school and security department of Peking University, then the public security bureau and police station of each town in Changping, and finally the hotels and guest houses of each town, asking them if a girl from Peking University ever lived there. All said no. Without any useful clue, they couldn’t provide any help for us. As a result, I could not wait any longer. Early on the fourth day, I decided to fly to Beijing. When I reached her dormitory in Peking University in the evening, she had just came back. Instead of being happy when she saw me, she started accusing me, “Dad, what are you doing here? How could you do that? You are a disgrace to me. Isn’t it just a survey? I don’t even have the ability for that? You don’t trust people, do you? As a man who has seen the world, how could you make random phone calls? Now the whole Peking University knows that I didn’t go back to school to sleep at night. Don’t you mean to make my classmates laugh at me?” After she said this, I criticized her for taking such a risk, but in my heart, I felt my daughter was really grown up and was more independent than my generation. I remember that when I entered the university, I was already nearly 30 years old. Although I had made a lot of efforts in the society, the textbook did not tell me how to conduct social investigation, and the teacher took us to the sociology course. By this comparison, I think today’s children are really extraordinary. (GEF, 2003) GEG’s maverick, boldness, and capability are not innate; in the final analysis, they are endowed by our open times and good education. Before entering Peking University, GEG had been studying in Guangya Middle School and High School in Guangzhou. Founded in 1888 by Zhang Zhidong, governor of Guangdong and Guangxi provinces of the Qing dynasty, the school was formerly known as Guangya Academy, whose name comes from “Guang is great and ya is elegant”.

The break of behavioral modes 125 Together with Ziqiang Academy and Lianghu Academy of Hubei, and Shanghai Nanyang Public School, it is also known as the four major academies of the late Qing dynasty. The educational goal of Guangya School is to be “upright and humble”, which was proposed by Liang Dingfen, a famous scholar in the late Qing dynasty and the first chief of Guangya Academy. In 1928, the 23rd headmaster Liang Shuming wrote the school motto of to be “pragmatic and practical”, which has been passed down as well, and become the belief advocated by Guangya teachers and students. Naturally, as one of the post-80s generation, GEG has not only received the influence of an extensive and elegant culture, but also experienced all the trials and tribulations of the exam-oriented education of the present. In the sprints for the college entrance examination in the third year of high school, in GEG’s words, If you went to classrooms in Guangya to have a look, it was just a tragic and stirring feeling. All over the walls were signs saying, “The wind is blowing, the water is cold, and the strong man is gone forever.” It was a very inhuman life. These lines are from the famous ancient Chinese poem “Yishui Song”, written by the assassin Jing Ke during the warring states period. He recited the poem as he said goodbye to Prince Dan of Yan, and was about to cross the Yishui river to assassinate the king of Qin, expressing a kind of sad, solemn and stirring mood. After this period of “inhuman” life, GEG felt mature, and had a qualitative leap in both perspective and character. And this was even more so when I entered Peking University. Her law school was full of top students from all over the country, including the No. 1 students from various provinces or cities or counties. When so many excellent children come together to communicate, interact, and have a collision of ideas, their knowledge becomes richer, their vision becomes broader, and their personality becomes more distinct. While GEG was studying at Peking University for her first semester, GEF and his wife were beginning their foreign life in the small town of Cambridge, Boston, USA. Naturally, the dynamic America, especially Harvard University, was extremely attractive to girls like GEG who had a broader vision than her parents and always wanted to fly on the journey of life. So, when the winter holiday came, she decided to visit her parents in Boston, USA. The trip surprised his parents and made GEG proud: My parents always thought I was a child who hadn’t grown up. They forgot that not only did I want to try everything since I was a child, but my English level was far beyond their ability (I was the third place finalist in the national college English speech contest, while Dad often had trouble understanding English spoken faster. They almost lost their luggage when they went to America). So when I first went to the United States, I did everything by myself, from my visa to my plane ticket. Worried about my first trip out of the country, my father wrote a full 11 pages of notes, including don’t miss your connecting flight, don’t forget the time lag between China and the United States, don’t

126 The break of behavioral modes take care of other people’s luggage on the road, and don’t let them take care of your luggage, either. Especially, my father told me not to offer help to others this time, because I was just the one who needed help from others. As a result, as soon as I got on the plane, I found that I couldn’t do without helping others. Many old Chinese people went to America to see their children, and didn’t know how to fill out the immigration forms issued on the plane, so I did it for them. When it was time for us to go through customs in Minneapolis, the American customs officer asked them questions in English, but they didn’t know what to do, so I had to be the interpreter. As it turned out, I wasn’t as retarded as my parents had thought; in the United States, I could adapt to the new life better than them. (GEG, 2003) GEG did not boast. Not only did she travel all the way from China to the United States, but she also helped others on the way. After returning to Peking University after the winter vacation, she ranked among the best in her college. In 2002, after a year of preparation, she was admitted as a doctoral student of law in an American university. Because of excessive use of her eyes, she suddenly suffered from an eye disease ten days before taking the legal English exam. Her parents advised her to take the exam the next year, but she persisted. In that year, 80,000 people took the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) across China, but there were only 200 students nationwide who took the legal English test in Peking University, among whom 100 students left halfway though. It is said that only 30 people went to the United States to study for the doctor’s degree in law that year, and GEG was one of them. In terms of fame, achievement, or wealth, GEG is inferior to “flying man” Liu Xiang, Guo Jingming, “race car driver” Han Han, “super girl” Li Yuchun, “billiards genius” Ding Junhui, “new director” Lu Zhengyu, and “entrepreneurial new rich” Li Xiang, but the plain-looking “girl next door” may be more representative of the post-80s generation, with their rebellious frankness and all the qualities and instincts of the world’s best children. China is a big family of 56 ethnic groups, so the unprecedented changes that began in 1978 will not just affect the Han nationality. In fact, in the era when the Mosuo woman Yangerchenam (Leorowi) went out of the world of women in Lugu lake and even went abroad (Yangerchenam & Li, 1997), numerous ethnic minority families in China also moved out of the grasslands or mountains and became involved in modern society and modern life. In my interview in Beijing, I was equally impressed by what the BCF family had gone through, and the changes their children had undergone; their impact on their parents was just as amazing. The BCF couple were both ethnic Mongolians of the same age and had just turned 50. Before the age of 13, BCF, who was born in a herdsman family, had been herding sheep on the grassland. Later, he went to middle school and didn’t have the chance to major in Mongolian literature at the Central University for Nationalities until the age of 25. After graduation, he worked as a magazine editor and also engaged in some sociolinguistic research in his spare time. BCM was BCF’s classmate at university and has been working as a translator

The break of behavioral modes 127 in the national translation bureau. Since they didn’t come to Beijing until they were 25, the BCF couple have been having some trouble adjusting: “Because we started to speak Mandarin very late, we can’t correct our accents, sounding just like foreigners” (BCF, 2005). But their two children, who were born and brought up in Beijing, not only have a fluent Beijing accent, but also act like Beijing children. BCB has a talent for mathematics. He went to primary school before he was five, and when I interviewed him in early 2005, this 22-year-old young man had been designing programs for two years at a professional computer company. BCG, a senior in the High School Affiliated to the North Jiaotong University, is smart and good at math and physics, but she also loves painting and has a sense of equality. In her words, Mom and dad don’t know that our relationship with our teachers is no longer the cat-and-mouse relationship they had in those days. Now teachers have to coax us, please us, because they don’t know as much. I told dad, but he didn’t believe me; he thought I was bragging. He did not believe that the teachers often “flatter” me, because I am outspoken and often find fault with the teachers in class. Well, instead of hating me, the teachers are all kind to me. Because they don’t know when I’m going to pick on them again, the teachers are very careful about what they say. Not to mention Mom and Dad, even my brother doesn’t believe it. That’s why I say there is a generation gap between people with a three-year age difference. (BCG, 2005) In fact, what really confuses BCF and his wife is not the fact that their son insisted on going to the department of computer science at the Beijing Institute of Technology rather than the department of mechanics at Tsinghua University, neither was it about their daughter picking on her teachers or telling her mom what was “right” to wear. The biggest headache for the BCF couple is that their children have a completely different outlook on career choice. When BCB graduated from university, the government asked for computer science graduates, but he said, “It’s boring to be a civil servant all my life”, and insisted on starting his own company. Because BCF and his wife were firmly opposed, after a stalemate he agreed to first work in a big company, and then start his own business after having accumulated some experience. BCG, who has not yet gone to college, chose an art major that, in her words, “is like artists such as Li Xianting floating in Songzhuang, predestined for a liberal lifestyle” (BCG, 2005). The BCF couple have suffered the biggest cultural shock of their 25-year life in Beijing: You know, we Mongols have always been on horseback. Because there’s so much liquidity, not only is business culture underdeveloped, and the concept of exchange is vague, but also property is not valued very much. I major in Mongolian linguistics. The root of the word “business” in Mongolian is “cheater”, so businessmen have no position in Mongolia. Therefore, in the Mongolian concept, the most noble job is to inherit culture as

128 The break of behavioral modes a teacher, an editor, a scholar or even a lama. We have been living an ordinary life in Beijing for 25 years, but every time we go back to our hometown in Inner Mongolia, we are respected and welcomed by everyone. But the children said, if either of us was more liberal-minded, and chose to go into business, our family culture would be a little more diverse, and household finances would be less strained. So when our son and daughter chose their major, we were opposed at the beginning. If a person does not have a regular work unit, isn’t it just like the “Beijing drifters”? But you know what they said to me? They said, “Oh, dad, don’t forget that our Mongolian people have been floating since Genghis Khan.” (BCF, 2005) BCF admits that they are now fully comfortable with their children’s choices and realize that we and the past, from the perspective of Mongolian culture, have been far enough apart. But compared with the children, we are still between traditional and modern culture. So now we respect the choices of our children; that is, we need to be in line with our children, with Beijing culture and with modern culture. BCF’s words remind me of a quote from Ruth Cherrington, the lecturer at Bulgaria’s St. Cyril and St. Methodius University of Veliko Turnovo, who wrote a passage in her 1997 book Deng Xiaoping’s Generation: Young Chinese Intellectuals of the 1980s which makes us feel that the changes in Chinese society over the past 35 years are not really the unique experience of a single family: The jingshang re was clearly related to the economic features of the generation which was maturing when economic reform was being prioritized. The demise of the “iron rice bowl” also added to the necessity to develop business acumen early on with students no longer assured of job assignments at the end of their university careers. Wang stated quite unequivocally that his generation would be “more adventurous”, and it was “impossible to imagine the old generation of educated intellectuals running their own shops. We want to. Life in business and trade is more adventurous. We will be more commercialized.” He also felt that they would be “more influenced by economic benefits, more concerned for himself than others such as the motherland, and the state. These are not so important.” This reflects the trend towards this generation being less self-sacrificing than their predecessors. … Being involved in the economic fever gave them a degree of individual autonomy. (Cherrington, 1997: 122) We have now fully seen that in terms of career choice, we have gone from single to diversified, from state and collective to individual, from disdain for

The break of behavioral modes 129 business to enthusiasm for “going into business”, so the BCF family’s experience is not a special phenomenon, but a general trend after the reform and opening-up. Of course, as Cherrington, BCF, and we have said, it starts with the younger generation; and now it has become a routine experience in Chinese people’s career choices.

Taste and style There’s more to the younger generation than just behavioral or professional diversity. In fact, they are showing signs of leading the way in all aspects of social life, while their parents and grandparents, who grew up before the reform and opening-up in 1978, failed to get ahead of their children. In the past 42 years of reform and opening-up, first our parents’ generation, then our generation, have found that our education and culture have not only left us behind the next generation in concept, but also in life style, including the taste and style of life that we shall soon be talking about. Taste is a kind of perceptual preference in daily life, which has both value orientation and aesthetic implication; style is a daily life style, which reflects the characteristics of people’s life and behavior. Although the two words are different in both Chinese and English, it is not easy to distinguish their meanings, which is why people often mix them. If I have to make a distinction between these two concepts, generally speaking, I tend to call the subjective interest of individuals dominated by their own values and aesthetic orientation as “taste”. As Pierre Bourdieu put it, it functions as a sort of social orientation, a “sense of one’s place”, guiding the occupants of a given place in social space towards the social positions adjusted to their properties, and towards the practices or goods which befit the occupants of that position. (Bourdieu, 1984: 466) At the same time, the objective behavior characteristics of individuals under the same value and aesthetic orientation are called “style”. According to Paul Fussell, it’s often not your job, your home, how much money you make, or how much property you own; it’s a series of subtle behavioral traits that you unconsciously or consciously manifest (Fussell, 1992: 2–3). Two of the most common themes in sociological studies of taste and style are (i) the relationship between taste and style and one’s social or class status, and (ii) the cultivation or reproduction of taste or style. Regarding (i), Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Classes in 1899, Helen and Robert Lynd’s Middle Town, David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Daily Life, Fussell’s Style, and Bourdieu’s Distinction all try to reveal the influence of a person’s or a group’s class status on their taste and style of life. For example, in his 1979 book Class: A Guide through The American Status System, Fussell identified differences in lifestyle among Americans

130 The break of behavioral modes of nine different social classes, from the dress, the furnishings, the style of the house, the car and its interior decoration, favorite drinks, leisure and sports, to the books read and the everyday language used (Fussell, 1992: 25–60). In his famous book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, Bourdieu revealed that there are four kinds of tastes or lifestyles associated with class habits in France: the ascetic aestheticism of intellectuals, the pretense of the middle class, the ostentation of the upper class, and the earthiness of the working class. In other words, “lifestyles arc practical expressions of the symbolic dimension of class relations” (Swartz, 2006: 186). Regarding (ii), the authors mentioned above, Bourdieu in particular, tend to believe that life taste or life style is formed in the process of a person’s socialization as determined by social class—for example, education plays a very important role in the reproduction of cultural capital (Bourdieu & Passeron, 2002: 88–89). Therefore, Bourdieu used the concept “habitus” to emphasize the sense of appropriateness and inappropriateness of different people’s behaviors in a stratified world, and it is this sense of personal position that drives people to avoid goods, people, places, and so on that are inconsistent with them (Bourdieu, 1984: 471). While we cannot say that the subject we are discussing has nothing to do with class or social class, our main concern in general is generational differences. In this regard, given the changes in the past 42 years of reform and opening-up, the differences in Chinese people’s life taste and life style are not only reflected among different social classes, but also between different generations. Some people divide contemporary Chinese multiculturalism into four types: mainstream culture, elite culture, mass or popular culture, and folk culture. Although they do not correspond to each other, to some extent they form people’s different tastes in daily life (Lu, 2009: 137). From the perspective of intergenerational changes, before the reform and opening-up in 1978, the whole society was influenced by the mainstream political culture and regarded all tastes and styles as the “patent” of the bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie, so our parents’ generation was dull on the whole, and certainly not tasteful. In the first ten years after the reform and opening-up policy, with the aid of the thought liberation movement, the elite culture represented by misty poetry, scar literature, star art exhibition, “cultural fever”, and even Cui Jian’s rock music began to influence the young elites of that period, and at the same time, mass or pop culture also began to sprout with bell-bottom trousers, sunglasses, and Hong Kong and Taiwan songs. After the transition of the whole of China towards the market in 1992, with the secularization of daily life, mass or pop culture was driven by market demand and the media with tremendous force. It is true that today’s post-80s or post-90s generation is influenced by mass or popular culture in terms of life taste and life style, but it is still full of irony and challenge, based on the natural alienation between youth and society. In dozens of interviews over the years, we have found countless occasions when children not only influenced their parents’ values and attitudes towards life, but were also their parents’ or even teachers’ spiritual mentors in life tastes and styles. Since there is so much related content in the interviews, we will summarize them.

The break of behavioral modes 131 First, a person’s aesthetic taste and life taste are the reflection of his or her living environment and life experience, so that Lu Xun states, “Jiao Da (in the Chinese classic The Dream of Red Mansions), a servant in the Jia family, could not have loved Sister Lin” (Lu, 2005, Vol. 4: 208). As with people in different times, it is quite normal for parents and children to be different or even opposite in aesthetic taste and life interest. However, we found in interviews that the final solution to this difference and opposition is not the children’s concessions, but the parents’ unconscious acceptance of their children’s influence on them. If the changes in reading tastes of the NGF couple mentioned in Chapter 3 under the influence of their children only involve aesthetic and interest issues, then the result of the parent–child interaction in many families is a change in the whole household pattern. In the mid-1990s, for example, when the NFF family moved from a two-bedroom to a three-bedroom flat, their son, NFB, who was a freshman at college, was busy designing utility lines and decor. His professor father, NFF, was upset: “Why do you bother? What are all those electrical outlets for?” But just a few short years later, it was found that the sockets were not sufficient. This fact has changed NFF’s attitude: “I’ve talked to my wife about moving again, and I’m going to leave it all to my son. We live as comfortably and elegantly as he feels” (NFF, 1998). Not only does the post-70s generation have an impact on the aesthetic and life tastes of their Mao-era parents, but today’s new parents are being challenged by a younger generation—their own children. SKM, an associate professor of family sociology at a university in Shanghai, not only has a doctorate degree, but also has been to Harvard University, one of the world’s top universities, on a study visit, but her love of Korean drama is disdained by her daughter SKG. SKG, who is just 11 years old, tells us solemnly that she really doesn’t understand why her mother is so interested in Korean drama: So fake. All TV shows are the same story, either you love me, or I love you, and cry a lot. I don’t understand why those Koreans have more tears than we kids? The most annoying thing is that my mother, who is an expert on marriage and family, is always watching Korean TV dramas day and night. It’s so idiotic. She likes actors with good looks best. I think she is the president of the “appearance society”. (SKG, 2014) Second, there is fashion consumption. As a generation influenced by consumerism, children born in the 1980s or 1990s often do not have the same concept of restraint on consumption as their parents, which is often the complaint of the parents. However, despite complaints, through interviews, it can be found that, while parents complain, they are still influenced by their children and quietly change themselves. NAF, who had studied aesthetics in college for more than 20 years, said that when his son NAB bought CDs, he always thought it was a one-time purchase, and not worth it. But over time he found that even CDs like Celine Dion had the value of being listened to over and over again: “Later,

132 The break of behavioral modes when I saw good CDs, I would buy them. After a few years, there are now several bookcases of CDs in my home” (NAF, 1998). BWF’s job is to buy and ship buttons between Wenzhou and Beijing, while the sales are handled by daughters and sons who set up stalls in Beijing’s “Zhejiang village”. He said, I am always frugal when I travel on business, but my daughter is influenced by Beijing people and always buys Vogue and Girlfriend magazines, some of which cost more than ten or dozens of CNY a copy. At first I was angry, thinking she didn’t know how hard it was to make money. But I found out later that she had a much better grasp of the fashions and buttons than I did, and it was only when I asked her that I realized that it was because of the influence of fashion magazines. Since then, even I would buy these magazines for her, and sometimes I read them myself. Over time, I feel these magazines have not only helped my business, but also changed my image of life. My children say I look more and more like a Beijinger. (BWF, 1995) Third, there is understanding of life style. Although cultural researchers call elite culture “elegant culture” and popular culture “vulgar culture” (Hall & Neitz, 1993: 6), what’s interesting is that in our interviews, those born in the 1980s and 1990s, who are fans of popular/vulgar culture, invariably said that their parents “have no taste, and their style is extremely vulgar”. For example, when we interviewed SEB in Shanghai, we met his parents4 who had come to visit their son and struck up a conversation. SEB did not work very hard when he went to middle school in his hometown, and his grades were not very good, so, with great difficulty, he managed to enter a specialized school in Shanghai after graduation from high school. However, it was probably because he gradually felt the pressure after living independently in Shanghai, in the second year of college, with the help of his cousin, that SEB started to study a “junior college to undergraduate” course in a university in Nanjing. At weekends, he went to Nanjing by train to take classes. Within one year, he successively obtained two diplomas of the junior college and undergraduate course, as well as a bachelor of law degree. After graduation, SEB found a good job in the highly competitive Shanghai, with a monthly income of more than 8,000 CNY. In his spare time, he also organized a soccer team in Shanghai, mainly composed of fellow villagers and classmates. Children from all walks of life helped each other, forming a useful social network. A few years later, SEB had a girlfriend and was getting married. Although SEF and his wife were directors and middle-school teachers respectively in their hometown, the income gap between inland and coastal areas put them under great pressure to help their son buy a house and get married in Shanghai. Under this pressure, SEM also came to Shanghai twice to inspect the house for her son, and their in-laws, who were in business and who had also offered 2 million CNY to their daughter, though they were rejected by SEB for various reasons. Not only that, they refused to go back to their hometown for the wedding ceremony. In the words of SEB,

The break of behavioral modes 133 My parents have too many relatives in my hometown, and my father is the director, so if you invite too few people to the wedding, people will complain, but if too many people are invited, the social influence is not good. Having dozens of tables of food and drink, inviting hundreds of people and receiving tens of thousands of CNY as gifts, these are the tackiest. So I insist that our wedding is still up to us. (SEB, 2010) As a result, self-assured SEB rented a picturesque, grassy hotel in the western suburbs of Shanghai for an open-air Western wedding, with champagne, flowers, music, and a toast. The 60 or 70 guests, apart from the parents of the newly-weds, were all the couple’s fellow residents, classmates, and colleagues in Shanghai. About a dozen of their friends from the football team made up the MCs, photographers, and seat guides, and, naturally, those with private cars were also commandeered for the wedding cars. The day before the wedding, SEF and his in-laws arranged to fly from their hometown to Shanghai together. When I was invited to the wedding, SEM’s face lit up with joy: “It’s better to be in Shanghai. This wedding is not only elegant, but also inexpensive. My parents didn’t feel so relaxed when my husband and I got married 30 years ago” (SEM, 2010). In the course of writing this book, I often went to Masland, an adjoining neighborhood, to play badminton with the NHF couple, who both graduated from Nankai University in Tianjin. NHF, who grew up in Hunan province, is a laid-back person. He first worked as a secretary in the marketing department of a steel company and then as a teacher in the social science department of a university of science and technology for several years. After 1992, he went to Beihai to do business for a while. Now, while investing in stocks and running his own small company, he writes some trenchant financial commentary. Although NHM is from Yangzhou, she grew up with her parents in Malan, a nuclear base in Xinjiang where they were soldiers, so her character has both a southern woman’s tenderness and the open-mindedness of a northern person. Since the couple made no effort to shape their daughter and their parents moved to Nanjing after they retired from the army, NHG, now 14, grew up with her grandparents and only comes back to NHF at weekends. NHM, a professor in the party school of the provincial party committee and a TV host, had extensive connections and did not lack money, but they did not send their children to the foreign language schools or the Affiliated High School of Nanjing Normal University as other parents did; instead, NHG went to No. 29 Middle School near her grandmother’s home by her own effort. Like many urban children born in the 1990s, NHG had been practicing piano since childhood before attaining level 8. I once saw her sitting in front of the piano in the club, playing with her childish face. There happened to be a few foreign children playing beside her, which became a multicultural scene in the upmarket community. Not only that, in order to cultivate her daughter’s self-reliance and thrifty spirit, NHM was very strict with NHG’s pocket money, so NHG took two of her mother’s

134 The break of behavioral modes doctoral classmates as students and earned her pocket money by teaching them to play the piano. That day, I went to the clubhouse to play badminton a little earlier than scheduled. I went to NHF’s home first, and it happened that NHG had just finished her piano lessons, so I had tea and talked with them in their living room. Although NHG was a little fat, and not as comely as her mother, her ordinary purple school uniform could not conceal her youthful charm. In particular, her understanding of music and life surprised one master (NHF), two doctors (NHM and one other who came to learn piano that day), and me, a “doctoral supervisor” specializing in “manufacturing” doctors. The conversation started about a party the other day in NHG’s class. Considering her excellent piano playing, the head teacher had originally suggested that NHG perform a piano solo at the class meeting. But after a few days’ preparation, the girl, who could play Clayderman’s “To Alice” or “The blue Danube” and was no stranger to Maxim’s “Croatian rhapsody”, suddenly decided to play a guitar solo in public. Although she had a good sense of music and a basic knowledge of piano, it was only half a year since NHG had begun learning guitar. As a result, the mother, who had allowed her daughter to have her way, disagreed. In NHM’s words, “First, playing the piano is elegant after all; secondly, you have only learned the guitar for a few days, while you play the piano at a professional level. Of course you should play the piano” (NHM, 2010). But NHG had a very different take on this: I know I can play the piano better, but at the class reunion, you are not meant to show off, are you? But playing guitar is not the same. Guitar is strings, which you can play in the way you like, and there’s even nothing wrong with wearing this uniform. And even though I only studied it for half a year, I thought about it for a long time before learning guitar. So, I’m good enough to play in class. You don’t know, that day I played “Gardenia blossoming” first. Although everyone liked this campus song, it wasn’t until later when I played “In the rain” by Wang Feng that everyone was really high! [As she spoke, NHG grabbed the guitar next to her and began singing.] “In the rain/I saw you/suddenly so sad/so crazy/for a moment, the past came up/time flies, I fell into memory.” I like this song, it has a rock and roll feeling, with special rhythm. [NHG looked at her mother with a deliberate emphasis.] Also, I like the spirit of rock and roll, which is “down with the boss”! (NHG, 2010) The “boss” clearly referred to NHM, and NHG took the opportunity to express her dissatisfaction with her mother’s interference in her performance. While NHG was singing, we were listening. On hearing “Once, we went to see a movie together/that story was so touching/still remember your tears/in the dark, we hold each other tightly/in the falling rain/can we still hold each other tightly as before”, I noticed that the grown-ups present became silent with their

The break of behavioral modes 135 own memories. Although I believe that no matter how precocious a 14-year-old may be, he or she may not be able to understand the true meaning of a “tight embrace” during first love, I also believe that this child had a much deeper understanding of music than those of us born in the 1950s or 1960s. So, without reading Fussell’s Style, NHG naturally understands that the guitar was the perfect instrument for the purpose of signaling these young people’s flight from the upper-middle and middle classes, associated as it is with Gypsies, cowhands, and other personnel without inherited or often even earned money and without fixed residence. (Fussell, 1992: 23) From that day on, I believe that there is really no reason at all to dismiss popular or vulgar culture in favor of an elitist culture such as that advocated by the Frankfurt School in Germany or the Spaniard Ortega Garset. In the West or Europe, centuries of well-developed life produced generation after generation of a social elite with good taste; the emergence of the “masses”—created by democratic regimes, scientific experiments, and industrial systems, in a word, by the so-called “technology” of the 19th century (Gasset, 2004: 50)—may have decimated elegant elitist culture. But in China, a country that had been impoverished in material and spiritual terms since 1840 by imperialist invasions and revolutionary traditions, over the 42 years of reform and opening-up, the popular culture of the younger generation, whether “mediocre” or not by European standards, is culture rather than “barbarism” after all. Therefore, I would also like to believe that, with the children of the SEB or NHG generation, modern cultural taste or life style really began its natural growth journey.

Spanning ages: who are our new idols? As NHG played the guitar and talked about her understanding of music and life, the looks of a group of adults reminded me of idols and idolatry. Although the 14year-old girl has not yet become an idol for us, you can’t belittle her existence and ideas. We did not pose such a “threat” to our parents when we were 14 or older, and our parents may not have had any real influence on their parents. There are many interpretations of idols in Chinese traditional cultural classics. For example, Shiji: Yin Benji (Historical Records: Records of Yin) goes: “Emperor Wuyi was ruthless. He made puppets and called them ‘gods.’” Shuowen Jiezi (Origin of Chinese Characters) goes: “A puppet is a human form carved out of paulownia wood.” From this, the definition of “idol” in the Modern Chinese Dictionary is “a figure made of wood, clay, etc. for the worship of a superstitious person and a metaphor for an object of blind worship” (2002: 942) In English, “idol” means “a representation or symbol of an object of worship; broadly a false god” (Mish, 1984: 598). Because “idol” is a “god” for people to worship, there will be idol worship naturally. People often express their admiration, adoration, and worship for the person or thing with divinity through various religious rituals, thus

136 The break of behavioral modes forming fanaticism, blind obedience, myth, and other social-psychological phenomena. Human worship psychology has a long history and has undergone a long evolutionary process, which is consistent with the rationalization process of human beings; that is to say, the objects of human worship have undergone the evolution of object, god, demigod, hero, and man. Accordingly, human worship psychology can be divided into natural worship, totem worship, deities worship, hero worship, and mass worship. Since the beginning of god worship, since humans use humanoid images to represent worship objects, there has been idol worship. Natural worship, such as “worship to heaven”, “sacrifice to the earth”, and “sacrifice to the stars” recorded in the Book of Rites, is the most primitive worship consciousness of human beings, which originates from the external awe of human beings in the natural environment. Totem worship originates from the fear and worship of the collective power of the gens by primitive humans. Therefore, some animal or plant representation replaces the spirit or power of the gens. As Durkheim writes, totemism is not the religion of certain animals, certain men, or certain images; it is the religion of a kind of anonymous and impersonal force that is identifiable in each of these beings but identical to none of them. … It animates the generations of today as it animated those of yesterday and will animate those of tomorrow. (Durkheim, 1995: 191) Deities worship is the further transformation of totem worship into man or man’s soul; if totems are only what Durkheim calls “sacred things”, then deities are sacred things with souls. When it comes to hero worship, the human element has expanded further, but the hero is not a man, but an extraordinary person with what Weber called “charisma”. He was able to generate a “subjective or internal reorientation” of the public by virtue of his special ability and temperament (Weber, 1978: 245). Finally, mass worship is idolatry created by modern mass society with developed communication media. In the words of Yue Xiaodong, public worship “takes three kinds of stars as worship objects: singers, movie stars and sports stars” (Yue, 1999). In my opinion, its two most prominent features are, first, due to the diversification and commercialization of modern society, the media, a modern idol manufacturing machine, always produces one at the fastest speed, and the faster it promotes them, the shorter the life course of its popularity. Second, the great difference between a popular idol and a hero idol is the digestion of charisma, so popular idols show the distinct trend of popularization, whether it is Super Voice Girls like Li Yuchun, Zhang Liangying, Zhou Bichang, or “Sister Lotus”, Han Han; “Sister Feng”, “Sister Feng’s husband”, and other “Internet celebrities”; these brats are now the pop idols of the mass age. In the field of psychology, it is recognized that the core problem of idolatry, especially the idolatry of teenagers, is psychological identity (Fromm, 1967;

The break of behavioral modes 137 Erikson, 1968; Yue & Zhang, 2004). That is to say, in the process of choosing idols to worship, people, especially teenagers, will appreciate, imitate, and accept the values, life attitudes, and social behavior patterns of their idols in their cognition, emotion, and behavior. Here, for the purposes of this discussion, we are not particularly concerned with idols and the general characteristics of idolatry. We are interested in who is whose idol, between parents and children, in today’s fast-changing society. Or who agrees with whom? Such a discussion is meaningful because it directly concerns the reality and possibility of cultural reverse. In other words, if the children really are somehow the idols of the parents, or the parents really identify with the children in some way, “learning from children” (Sun, 1998) and even the worship and imitation of those “brats” mentioned above are not rare or fabricated things, but a unique cultural phenomenon of our times. In the parent–child relationship, the worship by the offspring of their parents, especially the sons of their fathers, has a long history. In traditional China, a society where elders are respected, the same is true everywhere. Anyone who knows anything about psychology knows Freud’s Oedipus complex, and the psychoanalyst believes that social psychology must do further research on this most basic thing, that is, the relationship between people and their fathers, to find a solution for it (Freud, 1986: 192–193). Freud’s own solution is surprising, suggesting that the totemic animals of primitive societies are actually substitutes for images of fathers, and the worship of totems by primitive humans is an emotional expression of the Oedipus complex that appears in our children today (Zhou, 1993: 70–71). Even Freud, who takes patricide as the theme of Western culture, thinks that the motive behind this disobedience is still the worship of the father by the son. Indeed, in a society of slow change, both the strength and the wisdom of the father are the objects of worship and approval by the sons who exist in narrow spheres of life and social circles. In fact, until recently, the research of Yue Xiaodong and Zhang Zhouqiao found that parents, especially fathers, are the main objects of worship for children in mainland China. Specifically, from 1998 to 2001, the father was on the list of nominees for idols for four consecutive years, with the same frequency as Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong, and Bill Gates, and for three consecutive years, the mother was on the list, with the same frequency as Deng Xiaoping (Yue & Zhang, 2004). But, just as we paid admiration at SEB’s wedding or NHG’s singing, now the clock is actually going backwards. Not only are child idols now beginning to influence their parents’ choice of idols, but children themselves are often the idols of their parents, the idols they worship, or at least identify with. In Chinese cultural circles, few people do not know the philosopher Zhou Guoping. Some have read his early, brilliant Nietzsche study Twilight of the Idol, and most have read his Niuniu—almost any parent who has read the story of this child who died young will be devastated. Not long ago, the thirdmarried philosopher wrote a new book, Baby, Baby, based on the growth of his current daughter Jojo. Although countless people think Zhou Guoping is melodramatic and inauthentic, I still think that this naturally affectionate father’s

138 The break of behavioral modes feelings for their daughter are indeed sincere. This observant philosopher devoted a section of his book, entitled “Daughter as teacher”, to describing the innocent but brilliant response of a child, between the ages of two and nine, in daily life when it comes to conflict between the couple, justice, and the appropriateness of action. Zhou Guoping wrote, “I am not afraid to disclose my family arguments here, because I am not willing to hide the education I received from my daughter for the sake of face” (Zhou Guoping, 2010: 351). I believe that in today’s bewildering age of rapid transformation, this kind of education, which we call “cultural reverse”, is common even in the lives of philosophers: The CNY began to appreciate slightly, devaluing the foreign currency we were saving, so I was discussing with my wife Hong about our loss. She heard and said quietly, “Money isn’t that important.” I was awestruck and suddenly felt that I was a laity. So I asked, “What’s important?” “Life is what matters,” she said. “What else?” I asked. She said, “Work, because it puts what you learn to use.” I agreed. “It also makes life meaningful,” I said . (Zhou Guoping, 2010: 353) In the second chapter of this book, we discussed the phenomenon of cultural reverse, or the phenomenon of “the father is not as good as the son”, which has nothing to do with one’s sequence of learning, professional fields, or even intelligence and diligence, but only with the great changes in the living environment between generations over 42 years. Therefore, Zhou Guoping’s daughter is by no means the only one who has the ability to “backfeed” her parents. Today, it is not uncommon for children to influence, educate, and even discipline their parents. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2003, I said, “Parents used to follow the old order, but now they listen to their children” (Chang, 2003). In our interviews, there are many examples of parents taking their children as life rulers or role models. However, the mother–daughter interaction of BN family in Beijing is refreshing. When I interviewed them in 2004, BNF was 50 years old and engaged in commercial management in Beijing’s Blue Island Building; his wife, BNM, a year his junior, is now an HR manager at the Beijing Urban Construction Company; their daughter, BNG, 20, is a sophomore majoring in physics at Capital Normal University. BNF doesn’t talk much, but there is a lot to talk about between BNM and BNG. In their own words, they “are like sisters” (BNG, 2004). Although BNM is now just an ordinary HR manager, her experience before the age of 25 was dazzling. In 1955, BNM was born in the countryside of Zunhua county, Hebei province, close to Xipu village, where the Poverty Club was founded by Wang Guofan, which was praised by Mao Zedong. Shortly after graduating from the middle school in 1970, BNM became a private teacher at the age of 16, later became a commune cadre, and later became the party branch secretary of the brigade at the age of 22. Three years later, because her father, who had been a railway worker all his life, resigned, BNG became a railway worker, and in 1984, she transferred to Beijing with the railway engineering corps and became an employee of Beijing Urban

The break of behavioral modes 139 Construction Company. Two years later, BNM got married and their daughter BNG was born in the same year when they transferred to Beijing, where the family started an ordinary but interesting life. When my daughter was 10 years old and in the fourth grade, I was admitted to the senior management class of an adult college. In fact, I went to school partly because I used to be a private teacher and I have some interests, but, more importantly, I was stimulated by my daughter. Before that, I always watched TV and supervised my daughter’s homework every night. Once when I was watching TV, I talked too much, which affected my daughter’s reading. BNG was not happy. She said to me, “Mom, why are you making me study while you watch TV? If I study, won’t you study too?” I thought she was right. That way she would be able to focus and I would have something to focus on. In this way, I studied hard for a year. In the second year, that is, in 1994, I was admitted to a specialized course in the Party School of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee, and studied there for three years. In those three years, I went to class at night and on weekends. When there were no classes, I read and reviewed my lessons with my daughter. When I graduated in 1997, the party school stipulated that those who passed the exam all at once within three years could study for a bachelor’s degree. I was a little tempted, so I talked to my daughter and, of course, she quite agreed. But later, because the company stipulated that tuition fees would not be reimbursed, I wavered a little, and finally did not sign up. After school started in September, BNG always saw me at home in the evening, so she asked, “Mom, when do you start school?” I replied, “No, the company wants us to pay our own way.” She was irritated when I said this. “What about having to pay your own way? Why didn’t you discuss such a big matter with me? You’re too bold. How can you make your own decision?” (BNM, 2004) BNM admitted that education, or “discipline”, from her daughter really became her code of conduct. She was open to the idea that, as her daughter grew older, she could not be left out of her business. In this way, a few years later, BNM first took a second-level certificate in computer science, then a bachelor’s degree in law, and then an HR manager’s certificate. BNM was then the head of HR at the Beijing Urban Construction Company. After several years of night classes and self-study, she became more and more proficient in her work. BNM became a recognized expert in dealing with labor disputes and training labor skills. During the interview in Chongqing, I found CAF with the help of his brother, Professor Deng Peng from the department of history at North Carolina State University. CAF, 50, worked as a manager in a trading company, and his wife, CAM, had a bachelor’s degree and was a doctor in a big hospital. Their daughter CAG, 17, was a senior in Nankai High School, a prestigious school in Chongqing. Under the guidance of CAG, her classmate CBG and her mother

140 The break of behavioral modes CBM also came to CAF’s home. The two families were the first focus group we interviewed in Chongqing. Because I graduated from Nankai University in Tianjin with a master’s degree, I have a different feeling towards Nankai Middle School in Chongqing, so I not only interviewed many students from the school, but also made a special trip to it as a “pilgrimage” during my period of staying in Chongqing. Therefore, I got to know more about this middle school. In 1936, under the threat of Japanese militarism, the whole of north China was in danger. Out of consideration for the future of the school, Zhang Boling went to Sichuan to investigate. He bought more than 800 mu of land in Shapingba, Chongqing, and established Chongqing Private Nanyu Middle School, and posted Yu Chuanjian to be the director of the school. After the “July 7th incident” in the second year, various schools in Tianjin were bombed into ruins by Japanese planes. The teachers and students of Nankai University were displaced and moved from place to place. Later, Nankai University, Peking University, and Tsinghua University together established Southwest United University in Kunming. Some teachers and students from Nankai Middle School moved to Chongqing, and in 1938 Chongqing Nanyu Middle School was renamed Chongqing Private Nankai Middle School. In October 1945, after the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, Mao Zedong, accompanied by Zhou Enlai and Wang Ruofei, went to Nankai Middle School to visit Zhang Boling and Liu Yazi, which made Chongqing Nankai Middle School famous in the south-west. Since then, for more than 70 years, the school has been an academic mecca for numerous students and young elites. Probably because they were a single-parent family, compared with other families, mother–daughter communication and interaction between CBM and CBG were very frequent. What’s more, in the interview, we found that not only did CBM, a 42-year-old mother, say several times that she now listened to her daughter, but that CBG even decided how she dressed. She also admitted that her daughter’s movie idol was her own. When CBG first started to watch youth idol dramas, CBM was against it. Later, when CBG grew up, and didn’t watch them any more, CBM was “addicted” to them (CBM, 2004). Now, when it came to whom to worship, CBM was truly “following nobody but her daughter”. In fact, it is not just in the CBM family or Chongqing families, but in almost every family, that we find the idol community composed of various fashionable figures in one of the fields that fully reflects the children’s “power discourse”. Parents often wonder how their children come to know Leonardo, Michael Jackson, Madonna, the Spice Girls, the Four Kings, the Little Tigers, Wang Fei, Cui Jian, Michael Jordan, Cindy Crawford, and Professor Do Min Joon faster than they can memorize English words. For example, NBM in advertising said, Because of my career, sometimes when I talk “Mom, these are out of No matter what popular

I know a lot about movie stars and singers, but about pop stars with my daughter, NBG will say date,” and then tell me a bunch of the latest ones. figure she talks about, she knows it all. (NBM, 1998)

The break of behavioral modes 141 NBG was admitted to the broadcasting department of the Beijing Broadcasting Institute later. After graduation, she hosted the Daily Entertainment Broadcast program of Beijing TV station together with Li Xiang; talking about singing and movie stars really became her profession. Starting from the Frankfurt School, modern sociologists have pointed out the special role of the mass communication industry as a component of idol making (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1972; Baudrillard, 1988; Featherston, 2000). In China, the construction of film and television idols is closely related to the mass media pursuing commercial interests, no matter the birth of Hong Kong and Taiwan singers or “super voice girls” (Xiao, 2006). However, in the next chapter we will discuss a number of related topics, including consumerism; here we just want to point out that in today’s age of cultural reverse, idols and idolatry in the adult world are constructed through the perceptions and hobbies of the younger generation. Such a narrative naturally reminds us of the famous “theory of secondary communication” invented by Paul Lazarsfeld, a sociologist who emigrated from Austria to America in 1940, on the basis of the American presidential election. Partly inspired by the concept of “opinion leadership” by Freud’s nephew Edward Berners—the father of public relations (Rogers, 1994: 302)—Lazarsfeld studied the experience of Erie county during the U.S. presidential election and found that the influence of the media on the public was realized by “key individuals” such as opinion leaders (Lazarsfeld, Berelson & Gaudet, 1944). Now, the younger generation is the key individual in the process of the mass media’s influence on the older generation. In other words, the younger generation is beginning to play a pivotal role in the older generation’s understanding of life and the construction of its meaning.

Not just clothing is “out” Clothes are described as “fashion” in English as a synonym of popularity. So the trendiness of the younger generation and the outdatedness of the older generation are also reflected in this field of daily life. Think back to China in the 1960s and 1970s. First the blue Mao suit, then the yellow military uniform, became the first choice. During the Cultural Revolution, even beautiful young girls in winter often used men’s military uniforms to cover their cotton-padded jackets with plaid and small flowers, and without exception, they fastened the buckle on their military coats. But not long after the reform and opening-up, fashionable girls in big cities started wearing miniskirts, so much so that they, along with jeans, sunglasses, and moustaches, were included in the “clean up” list during the anti-mental-pollution campaign in the early 1980s. However, only a few years later, in 1988, when China’s economy was booming, girls in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and Nanjing not only wore short miniskirts, but also, for the first time, wore the black backs that used to be rarely worn by men in public. For the first time, not only were women more revealing in their clothes than men, but since then they have not lagged behind men in this respect. While there has been much debate among feminists, moralists, and women’s unions over whether underdressed women are a sign

142 The break of behavioral modes of women’s liberation or an insult to women, it is a fact that over the past 35 years, women have worn less and less, and this change started with young women. This brings us back to Simone de Beauvoir, who said in The Second Sex that the social significance of grooming is to allow a woman to express her attitude towards society in the way she personally dresses. If she obeys social convention, she will dress decently and fashionably. On the other hand, if she disdained the world, she might dress differently (de Beauvoir, 1986: 315). The popularity of jeans in China should be another excellent case study if the gender rivalry is set aside and the influence of age on clothing is taken into account. Although the graphite blue trouser suit was more than 160 years old when Levi Strauss, a Jewish businessman, made jeans from unsellable canvas in 1847, it really took off in 1951, after Marlon Brando played Stanley, the villain in The Train of Desire. In the 1960s, in the United States, where the “anti-war” wave was sweeping through and the youth movement was on the rise, jeans, as a symbol of openness and rebellion, gradually slipped from the legs of street scum to the legs of university professors. At the time, “jeans were seen as informal, classless, unisex, and appropriate to city or country; wearing them was a sign of freedom from the constraints on behavior and identity that social categories impose” (Fiske, 1989: 6). Jeans became popular in China in the 1980s. At this time, along with the reform and opening-up, the emancipation of the ideological field and the transformation of the economic field towards the market were accompanied by more general changes in the clothing field. First bell-bottom trousers, then jeans, these changes in the field of clothing, starting with young people, challenged the stereotyped clothing styles consistent with the rigid political life in the later period of the Cultural Revolution. Interestingly, the popularity of jeans in China over the past 42 years has roughly gone through two stages, just like the European and American societies described by Fiske. In the early days, it symbolized the rebellion of youth culture against mainstream culture, while now it is a sign of freedom and relaxation. In the former phase, jeans’ popularity among the younger generation, like that of disco, was as much a rebellion as it was a menace to adults or mainstream culture. In the latter stage, just as disco became popular among the elderly for its fitness benefits, jeans became popular among people of different ages and social classes for their freedom and informality. I still remember that in 1984, when I was studying for a master’s degree in Nankai University, although I had already put on my jeans, I dared not wear them at home in the summer vacation. Less than ten years later, I remember my 60-year-old mother wearing my sister’s worn jeans when she went dancing in the square. Perhaps to rationalize her hipness, the old lady repeatedly told us how “fit and feeling good” to dance in jeans was. Even today, at the age of 80, my mother often talks about how well she was and how easy it was to dance in her jeans. In fact, when it comes to the time for old ladies to wear jeans, if any young man still wants to distance himself from the mainstream values, or to express his sense of rebellion, as Fiske puts it, jeans “need to be disfigured in some way—tie-dyed, irregularly bleached, or, particularly, torn” (Fiske, 1989: 4). The younger generation’s influence on the older generation’s clothing over the last 42 years is not limited to just one pair of jeans. In our interviews,

The break of behavioral modes 143 almost all the parents mentioned that their children gave them a lot of guidance on dressing, among which the mother received more guidance from her daughter. For example, children are of course “advisers” and “judges” on what styles are fashionable, how to match colors harmoniously, and which brands are popular. In the old days, before the children went out, the mother would check if their clothing was appropriate; now it is the other way around, with mothers showing off in front of their daughters and even spinning around like dancers to get their daughter’s approval before they go out. As a supplement, some teachers also say that in today’s middle schools, busy teachers do not know what to wear in the face of changing fashions, but some students are sensitive to fashion and know how to follow fashion, so they often become the “model” for teachers to imitate (NAT, 1998). In addition to clothing, another common area where the older generation feels out of place is the discourse system, especially the dominant online language of the younger generation. Here, “discourse” refers to the language spoken or written by people in their daily life. But on a deeper level, as Foucault puts it, it is a language system overlapping with social practice, so the formation of discourse is closely related to non-discourse fields (institutions, political events, economic practices, and processes) (Foucault, 1972: 49). To be specific, people who live in the same country and speak the same language often have different discourse systems, as well as different intergenerational groups, because they belong to different regions (urban or rural), classes, occupations, or have different educational or cultural backgrounds. Since the discourse system is embedded in the social system, like Foucault, the analysis of discourse cannot fail to consider the power relations of the society. Take the intergenerational discourse system as an example. Before the reform and opening-up, the discourse system of the older generation, which was manifested as the mainstream ideology of the society, played a strictly dominating role over the younger generation, and the political indoctrination and moral education of the latter were everywhere in schools, society, and families (Wu, 2006). However, in the last 42 years, this influence has been broken. Although adult discourse reflecting mainstream ideology in the serious political and public social fields has not collapsed, it is still in a state of “holding on”; in everyday pop culture, the younger generation has come to dominate the world, so much so that the advertisement for One Hundred Thousand Bad Jokes, an animation film with box office receipts of over 100 million RMB at the beginning of 2015, read: “Parents over 40, please watch with teenagers.”5 The discourse power of the younger generation derives from the following aspects. First, the market economy gives them relatively independent economic status and reduces their social dependence on the older generation. Second, in the era of reform and opening-up, they gain distinct cultural advantages due to their natural sensitivity to foreign cultures and their natural proficiency in handling all kinds of implements. Third, because of their open and tolerant attitude to social changes and foreign cultures, as well as their concomitant cultural advantages, they have also gained an extraordinary ability to interpret various popular codes. Driven by these factors, according to Lu Yulin’s point of view,

144 The break of behavioral modes the younger generation usually construct their own discourse system in two ways. The first is the creation and use of new words, which are often selfcentered and do not adhere to strict Chinese norms but mix Chinese characters with English words and numbers, such as “I 服了you” (“I am overwhelmed”), “你 out了” (“You are out”), “你这个 286” (“You are 286” or “You are slowminded”), “网虫” (“net potato”), and “美眉” (a homophone for the Chinese word “妹妹” meaning “sister”; literally “beautiful eyebrows”, referring to beauty). The second way is to give new meaning to existing words or sentences, such as “恐龙” (literally “dinosaur”, referring to ugly girls), “青蛙” (literally “frog”, referring to ugly boys), “你的牙齿真白啊” (literally “Your teeth are really white”; as the Chinese 齿 chi and 痴 chi are homophones, “白齿” or “white teeth” here implies “白痴 idiot”, so this sentence means “You are an idiot”) (Lu, 2009: 116–117). The influence or reverse of the younger discourse constructed through the above channels on the older generation is mainly reflected in the following two sub-linguistic systems. First, the social buzzword system, and second, the network language or “net language” system. The so-called social buzzwords are the words that are popular in a society or a certain social group during a certain period. They have a certain timeliness and novelty. Although some people divide buzzwords into youth buzzwords and social buzzwords (Lu, 2009: 114), I think that even if some buzzwords are not created by the younger generation, but because the young generation pays the most extensive attention to catchwords, accepts them the fastest, and popularizes them with great enthusiasm, the social catchwords are often youth catchwords. The most prominent feature of social buzzwords is their time-effective social meaning, for example, “going into business”, “entering GATT”, “unspoken rules”, “aesthetic fatigue”, “Zhou Zhenglong’s photograph of a tiger”, “Fan Paopao”, and “Guo Tiaotiao” are all expressions derived from social events with deep meanings, and thus can quickly become popular and with clear meaning. It is worth noting that, as a discourse system of younger people, buzzwords have a self-evident influence on the discourse system of the older generation. Specifically, the influence of young people’s discourse on adult discourse is mainly reflected in vocabulary and expression (Zhang, 2005). In terms of vocabulary, most of these buzzwords were first used by the younger generation and then by the older generation, and in terms of expression, the younger generation is just as creative. For example, in May 1989, Shanshan Suit, which was located in Ningbo, Zhejiang province, borrowed the language style of the Shanghai dialect and advertised that “Shanshan Suit cannot be too smart”, which quickly became popular among young people. After that, expressions of affirmation through the negative form “cannot be too …” have become popular. Another example: In 2007, in a China Central Television (CCTV) news article about cleaning up the Internet, Zhang Shufan, a 13-year-old student, described a web page as “very erotic, very violent”, which was turned into a catchphrase by netizens to mock CCTV and other mainstream media. After that, “very …, very …” has also become a popular sentence pattern.

The break of behavioral modes 145 Network language emerged in the late 1990s. Due to the popularity of the Internet and network communication means such as QQ, network language has exerted considerable influence on the discourse system of Chinese society in two aspects. First, a number of network languages created by the network and mainly used for virtual communication, namely “cyber language”, have been produced. Its main features are simplicity and a mixture of Chinese, English, Arabic numerals, and symbols, some taken from traditional Chinese characters but given new meanings. For example, “囧” is one of the most frequently used characters in Internet chat, the Bulletin Board System (BBS), and blogs, and has been described as “one of the most popular Chinese characters in the 21st century”. “囧” (jiong) originally meant “light, bright”, but in web semantics it is endowed with the meaning of “depressed, sad and helpless” because it looks like a wry smile. For another example, “槑” (mei) originally was the ancient style of the Chinese character “梅” (mei) (plum), but because it consists of two “呆” (dai) (stupid), it is used to describe a person who is foolish, stupid, or very naive. Also, the network has become a platform for all kinds of buzzwords to grow and spread because of its convenience and timeliness; the fact that social or youth buzzwords in recent years have basically been network buzzwords is clear proof of this. For example, “to get some soy sauce” (meaning “a passer-by; being none of someone’s business”), “to do push-ups” (similar in meaning to “buy some soy sauce”), and “Jia Junpeng, your mum calls you home for dinner” are all cases in point.6 In our interview, many parents mentioned that to understand current society, they had to understand the Internet, and it is mainly through their children that they learn the popular languages there. Take NKM, a Chinese teacher in a middle school in Nanjing, for example. In order to share the same language with NKB, who was in his second year of high school in the same middle school, and to get to know his students, though over 40 years old, NKM had a youthful look and always paid attention to all kinds of fashion things. She also practiced yoga, had spa treatments, and occasionally became a “travel friend”. She called herself a “hip mom” to her son. At first, though, NKM often found herself at a loss to communicate with her son and his students, who were full of online language. Once, NKM and her husband, NKF, and their son, NKB, discussed where to buy a house, but NKB, who was always ready to give his opinion on family matters, was reticent this time. After questioning him, he blurted out, “I don’t know, so I’d better get some soy sauce.” NKM asked again, “What is getting some soy sauce?” NKB replied, “Mom, you’re too LT.” “What’s LT?” After NKM’s persistent questioning, the son finally told her, “It’s nothing. As a ‘hip mom’ how can you not know that ‘to get some soy sauce’ means ‘it’s none of my business’ and ‘LT’ is just the initial for ‘老土’ (lao tu), meaning ‘outdated’”. Stimulated by my son, I made a special effort to conquer “cyber language”. The students in my class were so amazed that they said, “Wow, the world has changed so fast that even the head teacher has become a ‘spy’” (NKM, 2009). In recent years, Internet language has begun to influence the adult world via the younger generation, and then infiltrated into the political life of Chinese people. In today’s China, many political leaders, in order to show their affinity

146 The break of behavioral modes to the people and keep pace with the times, also go online and “get electric shock”, and take the familiarity of Internet language as the cultural capital to approach netizens, especially the younger generation: The modern public opinion communication platform built by the Internet is changing China’s political life. Party and government leaders from some provinces and autonomous regions in China have gathered on the Internet to send greetings and best wishes for the New Year. “My colleagues and I often go lurking on major websites after work, looking for comments for improvements of our work,” said Han Zheng, mayor of Shanghai. Wang Yang, secretary of the CPC Guangdong Provincial Committee, and Huang Huahua, governor of Guangdong, hope that netizens will “hold a mouse in their hands and think of the world”, continue to “forge iron” in Guangdong’s development, to “weave bibs” (meaning “chatting in microblog”) on the hot issues of Guangdong people’s livelihood, and to “hit with a big brick” (meaning “giving criticism”) on the shortcomings of Guangdong’s work. Fresh Internet phrases such as “lurk”, “forge iron”, “weave a bib” and “hit with a big brick” have found their way into the hearts of netizens from the mouths of Han Zheng, Wang Yang, Huang Huahua and other local officials. These fashionable network buzzwords show that it is possible for Internet politics to be no longer just an empty talk, but gradually enter the official circles and popular feelings. (Shen, 2010) As the title of this section makes clear, what makes today’s parents feel outdated or out of touch with their children is not just an area of clothing, or even a discourse system, their outdatedness in behavior is pervasive, as it is sometimes in the areas of sex and married life. As we know, Chinese traditional society has always advocated that “males and females should keep a distance from each other”. According to Yu Yue, a scholar of the Qing dynasty, Hai Rui, an honest official who was well known in the Ming dynasty, was also a stubborn defender of ethics in this respect. When his daughter was five years old, she played with a boy and received food from him; but Hai Rui was furious, “How can a girl accept food from a boy? If you can fast away and die, you deserve to be my daughter” (Yu, Notes in the Room of Tea and Incense). Finally, this honest official actually forced his five-year-old girl to starve to death and die for feudal ethics. Given the relationship status of men and women under such a system, marriage, understandably, was no more than a means of procreation, devoid of sex and affection. After 1919, feudal ethical thought was impacted by the new cultural movement. Under the impetus of enlightenment thinkers such as Chen Duxiu, Hu Shi, Li Dazhao, and Lu Xun, the movement for equal rights for men and women drove Chinese youth to yearn for an emotional life. For example, Ba Jin’s “torrent trilogy” (Family, Spring, and Autumn) and “love trilogy” (Fog, Rain, and Lightning), and Ding Ling’s “Diary of Ms. Sha Fei”, reveal the brutal darkness of feudal ethics, as well as the determination of the younger generation to break the shackles under the influence of new ideological

The break of behavioral modes 147 trends. Sadly, after the victory of the revolution in 1949, “politics permeated every aspect of life in China, and was considered more important than happiness, love, and even life itself” (Diament, 2000: 177), which led to the spread of puritanism in family and married life in Chinese society. Revolutionary feelings took the place of love between men and women; widows and bachelors became the standard revolutionaries;7 “iron girl” replaced the fair lady; and the gender gap between men and women was erased. The whole society was afraid of sex and regarded it as a monster, so that the Barefoot Doctor’s Manual and the later Family Life Consultant during the Cultural Revolution turned out to be the main teaching materials for Chinese people’s sexual enlightenment. The changes also began in the 1980s. After the reform and opening-up, songs such as “The visitor on the iceberg” and “Sunny days in spring”, which praised the feelings and love of revolutionaries in the 1950s and 1960s, and novels such as Songs of Youth and Ancient City with Wild Breeze, began to have their restrictions lifted,8 and then The Second Handshake and various Western novels and music also began to be released. Shu Ting’s poem “To the oak tree” expressed the new view of women’s love “as if they were separated forever, yet they were always together” (Shu, 1985: 64). On January 8, 1981, the Market newspaper published the first marriage advertisement since 1949, which from then on has been an important channel for Chinese men and women to fall in love through newspapers, television, and the Internet. At the beginning of 2010, the TV dating show If You Are the One hosted by Jiangsu satellite TV became the top rated of all satellite TV channels in China, attracting 1.3 billion people’s attention in a vivid and lively form. The views of young people born in the 1980s on love and marriage shocked the older generation. Around the same time or even earlier, mixed marriages began to take off.9 At first girls rushed to marry foreigners, and now it is not uncommon for men to marry foreign women. Starting from the younger generation, Chinese people’s emotional life has become diversified and open, as can be seen from the famous saying, “lovers walk separately in the 1950s, walk side by side in the 1960s, walk arm in arm in the 1970s, hug each other in the 1980s and bind together in the 1990s”, a true portrayal of such emotional experience. Against such a changing background, different generations will naturally have different views on love, marriage, sex, and even the body, and the related concept changes will also show the characteristics of “feeding back” from the younger generation to the older generation. In our study, the case of N family from Guangzhou is worth discussing. In this three-generation family, there were GNF, 36, a municipal government official; GNM, a magazine photo-journalist of the same age; GNB, a 12-year-old son; and GNM’s parents. GNM’s parents were an elderly couple in their early 60s, one a retired cadre and the other a retired teacher, who came from their home county to Guangzhou after the birth of their grandson GNB to help their daughter. Now that GNB is grown up, they moved back and forth between Guangzhou and their hometown to enjoy their lives. GNM’s mother, GNGM, talkative as a former teacher, did not even shy away from the topic of “sex and love education”, but said she owed her openness to her daughter’s “reverse feeding”:

148 The break of behavioral modes I used to think that “love between men and women” was only for procreation, or it was more or less “dirty”. Later, after retiring, when I came to Guangzhou, through the influence of both my daughter and the books I read, I came to accept that sex was healthy, something to enjoy, and there should be no sense of guilt for engaging in it. (GNGM, 2005) GNM, 36, came to Guangzhou with GNF after graduating from university with a bachelor’s degree in Chinese literature, where she went on to graduate school. After graduation, she was a teacher in a middle school and then a photo-journalist. In her words, even though she now knows a lot about sex, holds no conservative views at all, and even quietly helps her mother with her confusion,10 before she went to college in 1987, she was as ignorant about sex as anyone in her generation. All her sexual knowledge came from the Family Life Consultant, which she had secretly read. In fact, there was only one chapter about couples’ sex lives, and I secretly read that chapter over and over again, full of curiosity. Because I had no experience of it, and the language in the book was so simple and obscure, I still didn’t know what to make of it. When I started menstruating at the age of 14, I was really nervous, thinking I had to carry the “menstrual belt” every day since then! However, today’s children know a lot more. They have a wide range of ways to learn about sex, and they have their own views on sex and the beauty of the opposite sex. For example, once when we were watching TV at home, there was a beauty show on, the adults were arguing with each other. GNB, who was just ten years old, kept chipping in, and I said to him impatiently, “Go away. What do you know about beauty, kid!” But the little fellow was not convinced and said, “Why don’t I know? Young girls are beautiful, unmarried and childless women are beautiful, women with long hair are beautiful, women with fair skin are beautiful, women with big eyes are beautiful …” He had never been taught these things, and it is not known where he learned them. When he said this, I deliberately lowered my face, “So your mother is the ugliest?” However, he immediately said, “No, mom, you are the most beautiful person.” As I was enjoying myself, he added, “But the most beautiful in our house.” The grandmother, who was sitting aside, pretended to be unhappy when he said this. “Oh, boy, if your mother is the most beautiful, your grandmother is the ugliest then?” The little fellow calmly replied, “That’s not true. Mom is the champion and you are the runner-up.” I was impressed by my boy. Unlike us when we were kids, today’s kids know everything, and sometimes they want to ask their parents just to get confirmation from them, because the parents’ explanation can release their anxiety and pressure on gender consciousness. So today’s parents need to change their mindset and perfect their knowledge to meet their children’s growing needs. (GNM, 2005)

The break of behavioral modes 149 Today’s children are a precocious generation, and many factors contribute to this early maturation, including good nutrition for the early development of the body, the high level of social openness, the hints and stimuli from TV programs seen everywhere, as well as the openness and tolerance of parents and teachers, who, like GNM, provide appropriate sex education to their children in different ways. At the same time, the communication between children, or their peer group, is also an important reason. In our interviews, more than one family reported that children were sexually precocious these days, and that they were open about their bodies and their sexuality, not as coy as people 42 years ago were. NLF, a car agent, lived with his wife, NLM, 43, a magazine editor, and their daughter, NLG, 16, a high-school freshman. NLM was pretty when she was in college; with a small figure that was very charming, she was the kind of beauty whose age is not visible. Like most people of that era, however, NLM was not well-developed, “with breasts like a pair of teapot lids”, as she put it. However, because of either the good living conditions, or the heredity of her father’s family, their daughter NLG, on the other hand, was very plump. On seeing that NLG always wore tight clothes, intentionally or unintentionally, NLM was a little bit unhappy, fearing that NLG might invite trouble for herself, so she wanted to set up a dressing code for her. To her surprise, after several occasions of futile resistance, NLG shouted at her, “Mum, you’re jealous of me!” Indeed, NLM had to admit that, except for the possible reason of jealousy, there was no other excuse for trying to control her daughter: NLG is a good girl, a student cadre in a key middle school, and her academic performance is beyond question. When she talks about my alma mater, she always showed a look of despise, “Well, does your school count as a university? I’m not going to your school.” (NLM, 2010) I could tell the pride in NLM’s complaints. Yes, such a beautiful and studious and aspiring daughter always gave her mother a sweet return after all the hardships, while another kind of return concerns that of thoughtful SDG. SDF, 45, after graduating from secondary school, worked in agricultural technology in his hometown of Dazhou, Sichuan province. At the age of 30, he divorced his wife and resigned work as a salesman with his cousin in Shanghai. Five years later, after having settled down, he brought his daughter SDG to live with him in Shanghai. Before long, SDF remarried SDM from Shanghai, who was ten years his junior and had a boy. At first, SDF was afraid that SDG would not understand him and that she would not get along with her stepmother SDM and her stepbrother SDB. As a result, after several years, SDG not only basically adapted to the environment of Shanghai, but also was admitted to the major of literature and history in a vocational and technical college (it was not easy for SDG, who had never learned English at home and could never catch up). What’s more, she got along very well with her stepmother and stepbrother; in her own words:

150 The break of behavioral modes I have a closer relationship with my Shanghai mother, SDM, than I do with my birth mother. As a result of living together, there are many more common topics with SDM, and the weekly phone call with my birth mother becomes a “ritual” or “obligation”. In fact, I quite understand my parents, they are not easy. (SDG, 2014) Because of SDG’s generosity and understanding, SDF’s relationship with his ex-wife was quite smooth, and they would send greetings through their daughters. In a word, they benefited a lot from their daughter’s way of doing things. Although parents are influenced or challenged by their children in terms of values and behaviors, in the end, no matter whether it is the ideal of life, or the attitude to life, or action, there is no absolute right or wrong. There have been challenges in these areas, but there has been no disruptive crisis yet. Comparatively speaking, their real Waterloo in life probably concerns the operation of objects. In front of computers, mobile phones, film and television media, cameras, projectors, and a range of other electronic products, they really feel clumsy and dwarfed by their children. On such occasions, as we shall soon see, the older generation have become the children’s pupil, accepting their instructions and, of course, impatience, with an open mind, because they know that today they have to adapt to this complex world, electronic or digital, through their children and the younger generation.

Notes 1 In King’s From Tradition to Modernity, his interpretation of “formalism” is the disconnect between “what should be what” and “what is what” (King, 1999: 74). Here, the reason why I interpret “formalism” as the disconnect between “what should be” and “what is” is that I think Max Weber’s distinction between “what should be” and “what is” (Weber, 1949: 51) when discussing the form of knowledge in his methodology of social science is very concise, and it is appropriate to extend it to the field of behavior. 2 On March 2, 2006, post-1980s writer Han Han published a response article “The literary world is a fart, no one should be pretentious” in response to famous literary critic Bai Hua’s “Post-80s’ present situation and future”, which fully demonstrated Han’s arrogant personality, as well as his disdain for cultural authority. Meanwhile, Gong Xiaobing, also a writer born in the 1980s, was not only the creator of the term “post-80s”, but someone also full of aggression and arrogance as he pursued fame. He became a person of the moment on the Tianya social network in 2004 by provoking and participating in various online debates (see Li, 2013: 23). 3 Jay Chou sings in the “Embattled”: “My life is like a play/With so many directors and screenwriters./I only said one line,/And they set eight hundred tones/To manipulate my emotions,/And it wasn’t my tone at all./They just want to get the audience to see the show,/And the ultimate goal/Is but to boost ratings./I don’t know if I have the courage/To take off their masks./I just know that serious men are the most beautiful./Will I go on until they’re satisfied?/la la la la la la la la la la/Oh, Oh, I can’t go back./la la la la la la la la la la la la/Oh, Oh, I can only go straight on./… I am still me./No one can change me./Although I know there are plenty of archers/Who want to shoot me as I climb up,/No one can hurt me when I get to the top./It’s hard for

The break of behavioral modes 151

4 5

6

7

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9

you archers to toil with writing./I’ll keep you as friends,/Because I know it’s just your job./Come on! The dog with the apple./You can be my dog,/Though you are not my match.” For narrative convenience, SEB’s parents are called SEF and SEM, although they work in other places. One Hundred Thousand Bad Jokes was originally a cartoon published on the website of Evil Spirit Comics. After it was adapted into an animation film of the same name in 2012, the original cartoon immediately became a hot topic on the Internet. The stories, humorous jokes, and teasing methods were so impressive that they won the praise of China’s version of Japanese comics. At the end of 2014, a mobile game of this animation was launched for testing. On New Year’s Day 2015, the film of the same name was released, and the box office receipts instantly exceeded 100 million RMB. After the “erotic photo gate” incident at the end of 2007, when the Guangzhou TV station was interviewing people on the street, one respondent casually said, “It’s none of my business. I came out to get some soy sauce”. Since then, “getting some soy sauce” has become popular through the Internet, whose implied meaning is “it has nothing to do with me; I’m just a spectator”. In 2007, a drowning case in Weng’an county, Guizhou province triggered the “June 28 incident”. Police said at a news conference that Li Shufen drowned herself while the suspect was doing push-ups on the bridge. Since then, “doing push-ups” has become a popular Internet phrase, with people expressing their dissatisfaction with the result of the police handling in a playful way. On July 16, 2009, in the Baidu World of Warcraft Bar there appeared a mock sentence “Jia Junpeng, your mum calls you home for dinner”, which attracted more than 200,000 hits in just five hours, nearly 10,000 netizens joined in the post, and which thus became the buzzword of the year. Some people have analyzed the popularity of this irrational online post as reflecting the extreme loneliness of modern urbanites. Later, however, “Taiwan, your motherland calls you home for dinner” expressed the influence of this phrase on Chinese political life. Interestingly, in several revolutionary model operas popular during the Cultural Revolution, both male and female positive characters had no family and no love, and they were “saints” who did not touch each other. For example, Jiang Shuiying in Ode to the Dragon River, Fang Haizhen in Harbor, Sister A Qing in Shajiabang, and Ke Xiang in Azalea Mountain are basically “widows” whose husbands are dead or whose lives are unknown. Li Yuhe in The Red Light, Guo Jianguang in Shajiabang, Yang Zirong in The Capture of Tiger Mountain, and Hong Changqing in The Red Detachment of Women are also “bachelors” or “widowers” without wives or children. By contrast, the model opera’s main promoter and champion, Jiang Qing, was a movie star in 1930s Shanghai who had an emotionally chaotic and avant-garde life. Those who did not live in that era cannot understand how the Cultural Revolution destroyed and hurt the spiritual world of the Chinese people, nor can they understand how the reform and opening-up in the 1980s brought people a feeling of spring. I still remember today that in the summer of 1977, when I was in Zhou lang brigade in the Tuqiao commune of Jiangning county, I was on my way to the brigade department from my 11 production squad to apply for the university entrance examination. When I heard the newly released melodious song “Honghu water waves” for the first time, I felt excitement all over. For me, then 21 years old and accustomed to the roaring of “the cultural revolution is good, really good”, the melodious female voice brought me an unprecedented physical and mental experience. After the reform and opening-up, the first mixed marriage probably took place in Hunan Normal University. In the winter of 1979, Judith Chabiro, an American teacher in the college, fell in love with Liang Heng, a Chinese male student. After encountering difficulties, Judith wrote to Deng Xiaoping for approval, and they held

152 The break of behavioral modes an international wedding ceremony in Xiangjiang Hotel in Changsha in May 1980 (see Dai, 1992: 458). 10 GNM’s parents, who were in their early 60s, had previously had little sex because they were busy with work and family. However, according to GNM, after they came to Guangzhou, their life became more regular. They did exercises in the morning, played mah-jong in the afternoon, and danced or played table tennis in the evening. As a result, their health improved, and GNGF even regained his desire for sex. In the words of GNGM, “after coming to Guangzhou, this old thing has got much better because of regular exercise, and now he even wants that again”. Because of physiological reasons, GNGF’s requirements left his old wife at a loss, so her daughter helped her go to the drugstore to buy lubricant. Later, a tacit understanding was formed between the daughter and the mother, which further led to the open conversation between GNGM and GNM. GNM understood the closed and conservative attitude of the mother at that time, and GNGM also understood the accommodation and openness of the daughter’s generation.

5

Artifact power not to be neglected

We live by object time: by this I mean that we live at the pace of objects, live to the rhythm of their ceaseless succession. Today, it is we who watch them as they are born, grow to maturity and die, whereas in all previous civilizations it was timeless objects, instruments or monuments which outlived the generations of human beings. Jean Baudrillard

Dad always says the last generation is better than the next, so why did Watt invent the steam engine when his father didn’t? A 12-year-old boy

Trials from McDonald’s Human civilization or the culture we are talking about is closely related to food production or farming, which is why the first explication of “culture” in English concerns the use of “cultivation” (Mish, 1984: 314). Today, almost all anthropologists agree that culture is divided into three levels—spiritual culture, behavioral or normative culture, and material culture—though food or human food permeates all three levels. Chinese views on food, including the Chinese concept of tonic food, belong to the spiritual culture; their way of making food and eating it, including its complicated etiquette, belong to the behavioral or normative culture; while their rich and colorful food and its various containers belong to the material culture. The link between food or diet and human culture or civilization is so important that the American Chinese anthropologist Zhang Guangzhi is convinced that one of the best ways to reach the core of a certain culture is through its stomach (Chang, 1977: 4). In the stomach of a nation lies its grasp of material life, according to Fernand Braudel, a French almanac historian. Whether a nation eats grain or meat depends on the size of the population. Relatively sparsely populated Europe relies on wheat, which forms a trinity with flour and bread that has run through Europe’s history. For people back then, to live was to eat bread (Braudel, 1992: 118, 165). Asia, with its relatively dense population, relies on rice, and rice and population exist in a double relationship of mutual dependence. For one thing, rice is produced far more than wheat, making overpopulation in DOI: 10.4324/9780429447679-5

154 Artifact power not to be neglected Asia possible; for another thing, only overpopulation could “serve” rice because it requires much manual labor to grow (Braudel, 1992: 167).1 In the stomach of the members of a nation, there is a deposit of its way of life and even its statecraft. “The loyalty of Americans to Uncle Sam is actually loyalty to American doughnuts. The loyalty of the German people to their motherland is in fact loyalty to the German fried frites and fruitcakes” (Lin, 2000: 328). As for the Chinese people who are always longing for “seizing the great tripods representing different parts of the nation” (meaning “taking over the country”), since a cooking pot is regarded as an artifact symbolizing regime and power (Yi, 2006: 2), Lao Zi naturally warns that “governing a great country is like cooking a small fish” (Lao Zi: Tao-Te Ching). In the stomach of a nation, there is also a deposit of its understanding of the meaning of life. “Drinking while singing, how long can life be?” is an outlook on life; “a handful of rice to eat, a gourdful of water to drink, living in a mean street, while others could not stand such a poor life, Yan Hui did not change his pleasure in the pursuit of truth” (The Analects of Confucius) is also an outlook on life. In Chinese culture, “food and sex are human nature” (Mencius) or “eating, drinking and sex are basic human desires” (Book of Rites) not only explains the significance of food or sex to human beings, but also shows their different order of significance for human survival. And “food is the soul of the people” shows that the people’s right to survival is the basic legitimacy of a regime. The importance of food in human survival and in human culture makes it a good idea to take a look at food, a less complex area of physical life that has changed dramatically since 1978, before we discuss electronics or the increasingly digital world they make up. Compared with the shortage economy era before 1978, the changes in the food sector over the past 42 years of reform and opening-up are not only shown in the fact that the Engel coefficient of Chinese households keeps decreasing with the growth of GDP,2 with Chinese people spending a smaller and smaller share of their income on food, but the variety of food on their table keeps growing, which is shown in the increasing food choices of more and more Chinese families—not only do children’s foods that were not available before appear on Chinese tables, but children or the younger generation, who have never had a say in food choices before, also have a growing say. If, as American anthropologist James Watson put it, Chinese children before the 1960s ate what the adults ate, and even Lu Xun, in his nostalgia for his childhood, never mentioned food for children (Watson, 2000: 199), then today’s children are not only early adopters of all kinds of new foods, especially imported foods, they are also the decision-makers regarding family recipes. In many cases, it is they, not their parents, who decide what, when, and how to eat at home. Although many changes have taken place at the dining table or concerning food in China in the past 42 years, we can say from the perspective of intergenerational relationships that these changes began when children tried McDonald’s or KFC. In Chapter 3, we mentioned that the first Western fast food restaurant that arrived in mainland China was a 500-seat KFC restaurant built in 1987 to the south-west of the Mao Zedong Memorial Hall, and five years later, the 700-seat Beijing McDonald’s opened on Wangfujing Street.3 Even today, McDonald’s, the industry

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leader, has more than 38,000 restaurants worldwide and an annual revenue of more than 21 billion USD, though the slow pace of expansion in mainland China over the last 20 years is still holding McDonald's back, which has just over 3,100 outlets in China, compared with KFC, which has just 22,000 outlets worldwide but 6,500 in China" in 2019. The reason why I have titled this section “Trials from McDonald’s” instead of “Trials from KFC” is that many scholars regard McDonald’s as one of the most important symbols of American culture. For example, sociologist George Ritzer directly regards McDonald’s as the “ultimate icon of Americana” which “has influenced a wide range of undertakings, indeed the way of life, of a significant portion of the world” (Ritzer, 2011: 7, 1). Anthropologist James Watson also maintains that “in Beijing, for instance, a new class of yuppies has embraced the company as a means of connecting to the world outside China” (Watson, 2006: 2). It should be noted, however, that there is really no either/or consideration here for McDonald’s, except that it is convenient and that it has a bigger influence than KFC. You could also change the title of this section to “Trials from KFC”, “Trials from Berger King”, or “Trials from Pizza Hut”. These fast food chains, which have been in mainland China since 1987, offer a variety of food, but they offer the same lifestyle or culture. Here we begin to touch on the issues that relate to the subject of this book: Why did McDonald’s or KFC sweep across the Chinese mainland in the 1980s and 1990s? In what ways do they win the hearts and minds of Chinese consumers, primarily non-adults? Finally, how do the children or the younger generation become the central figure and push this consumer revolution to the rest of the family? George Ritzer, in his analysis of the reasons for McDonald’s reign, stated that “McDonald’s has succeeded because it offers consumers, workers, and managers efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control”. Specifically, firstly, McDonald’s provides efficiency, or the most direct and fast way to get from one point to another. Secondly, McDonald’s provides calculability, or it emphasizes not only the quantity of products sold (copies and costs), but also the quantity of services provided (time required to obtain products), which is the most important sign of rationalization in the economic field. Thirdly, McDonald’s provides predictability. Because things can be calculated, we can try to predict the way it works and the result of it. For example, you can predict that McDonald’s products and services will be the same everywhere in the world. Finally, McDonald’s has implemented effective control over consumers, such as queuing, a limited menu, few choices, and uncomfortable seats, which makes people follow the vision of McDonald’s management—eat quickly and leave (Ritzer, 2011: 14–16). If Ritzer has shown the link between McDonald’s’ success and the rationalization of American social life, it is now up to him to explain how McDonald’s has managed to do so outside the USA, particularly in Asia, including China. Obviously, the expansion of McDonald’s in Asian society is firstly related to the change of class structure brought about by the large-scale urbanization and industrialization of Asian countries or regions after the 1970s, which produced a large number of middle-class consumers (Robison & Goodman, 1996). As James Watson stated, the

156 Artifact power not to be neglected opening of McDonald’s in East Asian and Eastern European countries occurred basically at the time when these countries or regions were beginning to industrialize or transform socially (Watson, 2006: 14).4 In China, for example, the average annual salary of Chinese workers was only 615 CNY at the time of the reform and opening-up in 1978, though this figure has been increasing since then, nearly doubling or even more every five years (National Bureau of Statistics). At the same time, people’s consumption behavior also began to be influenced by the state. By the time McDonald’s opened in Beijing in 1992, at least two groups of people had become rich first. There were the urban and rural people who first devoted themselves to the market economy. These people were very similar to those who engaged in the “second economy” in Hungary at the beginning of the reform described by Szelenyi (Szelenyi, 1978). The second group were the children of cadres who had grown rich mainly through parental power and the “two-track” policy. Since then, in the second 15 years of China’s reform, cadres and professional and technical personnel who previously had advantages in the redistribution economy quickly became the main members of the middle class by virtue of the political capital guiding the transformation, or the cultural capital needed for the transformation (Zhou, 2010). These young white-collar workers were the first consumers or spiritual followers of McDonald’s in China. The expansion of McDonald’s in Asian society is also related to the change of family structure there. In the process of industrialization or urbanization, with the universalization of the employment of intellectual women, the younger generation in Asian societies began to leave their extended families and live alone after marriage, which, as Jane Robinson and James Watson say, affects gender relations, parenting practices, and household patterns (Robinson, 1985; Watson, 2006: 14–15). Furthermore, in China, the above changes in the miniaturization of families were even more influenced by the central government’s one-child policy after the 1980s. In China’s cities, especially in the big cities, newly rich families are piling up, and these families have only one child per family due to the birth policy, which inevitably leads to these children, known as “little emperors” or “little princesses”, becoming the center of the family. Children are also becoming the center of the family, especially the center of consumption, because of what their parents and grandparents experienced during the Mao era. Having experienced extreme deprivation in food and other aspects of material life, today’s parents want their children to be better off than they were (Davis & Sensenbrenner, 2000: 57). In our interviews, many parents also said that “now that conditions are good and we have only one child, we will try our best to satisfy whatever they want to eat” (NBM, 1998; GCM, 2003). In fact, such parents are not limited to the well-off middle-class families, but also the most ordinary urban working or working families. For example, during the interview in Beijing No. 65 Middle School, I had quite a deep conversation with BK family. This was an ordinary family. The father BKF was a taxi driver, the mother BKM worked in an enterprise, and their daughter, who was in the second year of high school, was not only smart but also possessed all the children’s dreams in this era. Yan Yunxiang once said, “In modern

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China, most parents want their children to get ahead, so they spend a lot of money on their children’s education” (Yan, 1997: 62)—and so it was with the BK family. Although at the time of my 2004 interview, her parents had not yet bought the 17-year-old BKG a mobile phone (BKG told me that less than a quarter of her classmates did not have mobile phones), they did actively support BKG to go to painting and writing classes, and they said they would like to devote all their “intensive care to their daughter” in terms of food. BKG told me that her family was not the only one who indulged their children in food and clothing. A passage about a spring outing in the diary she showed me fully reflects the present happy life of children without worries about food and clothing: We went to buy food the day before our spring outing. On the way back, I asked a male classmate to carry two heavy bags for me, making him sigh, “The society is dark, some people are always oppressed by others”. At the same time, he also said something classic by saying: “Is this called ‘spring outing’? I see it as ‘spring eating’”. Indeed, a spring outing is to a great extent a mass of people around a mountain of food, shoving everything indiscriminately and figuratively into their mouths, and then their stomach is so full that they walk around the park as a kind of digestion. This time was no exception. The rice rolls made by A’s mother were very popular, and even the few girls in my class who were on a diet at ordinary times could not resist the temptation and ate a lot. I ate and ate until I couldn’t eat any more, but still wouldn’t take my eyes off the food. (BKG, 2005) The abundance of material life, and the improvement of the decision-making power of the children being the center of the family, make these “post-80s” or “post-90s” children masters of consumption within the family (Yan, 1997: 62–63), and make fast food restaurants, such as KFC and McDonald’s, the consumption paradise of the younger generation. According to Yan Yunxiang, “most consumers who come to these western-style fast food restaurants fall into three categories: Professionals and white-collar workers; young couples and teenagers; children accompanied by their parents” (Yan, 2000: 216). Although they are all young, the motivations for coming to McDonald’s or KFC are not exactly the same. In the 1990s, when the cafes or bar streets that would later be ubiquitous in metropolitan places—Houhai and Sanlitun in Beijing, Xintiandi in Shanghai, and 1912 in Nanjing—were less common, McDonald’s and KFC, as symbols of American culture, not only served as a place for young professionals and white-collar workers to relax, but also as a space for them to obtain some social identity, although it was inconsistent with the fast food tenet of “eat quickly, leave quickly” established by McDonald’s or KFC in the United States (Yan, 2000: 219–220). For young couples and teens, McDonald’s and KFC, where you can make your own decisions and choices, were a great way to enjoy the romance of a two-person world (for this reason, McDonald’s created a “valentine’s corner” for lovers) or peer friendships

158 Artifact power not to be neglected without parental interference. Finally, for children who came with their parents, the appeal of McDonald’s and KFC lay not only in the natural allure of fried foods, but also in the small playgrounds and elaborate consumer activities these fast food restaurants had managed to set up. NBG recalled that when she was young, she liked to go to McDonald’s or KFC, sometimes just for a set of cartoon dolls (NBG, 1998). From the theme of this book, it is worth discussing how children or the younger generation spread the consumption revolution happening in McDonald’s or KFC to their families and even the whole society. On this topic, Guo Yuhua studied the changes of children’s food in the process of social changes in 1998, confirming that in these years, along with the reform and opening-up, especially with the wave of globalization, the knowledge and ideas about food passed down from generation to generation in China changed or were even broken. To be specific, three generations of Chinese families have relatively different knowledge systems about food, and they take into account different factors, standards, and concepts in the process of food selection and food arrangement. The children have more obvious characteristics of modern consumerism than their parents and grandparents. Unlike generations in traditional societies, who share much the same system of food knowledge and rely mainly on top-down intergenerational ear-tomouth transmission, children receive food information and knowledge from the market, advertisements, and peers, sometimes more than their elders. Family decisions about what to eat and how to eat reflect changes in family status, and children’s centralization tendency and expansion of independent space tend to be obvious (Guo, 1998). During our interview in Guangzhou, 12-year-old GAB was accompanied by his grandparents GAGF and GAGM. GAGF told me that his parents, one working in Huaxia Bank and the other in ICBC, were usually very busy. Therefore, two years before, after his parents were transferred from Sichuan to Guangzhou to work, his retired grandparents soon followed to take care of him. It could be seen that the grandparents loved GAB very much, and this fifth-grade student in the Affiliated Primary School of Sun Yat-sen University was really cute. GAB loved reading. In the words of his grandmother, “In Sichuan, he even read books on ecology and crops in his grandfather’s study” (GAGM, 2003). And he knew everything about history. He liked to watch Historical Records, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, Up and Down Five Thousand Years, and Juvenile Encyclopedia. He also liked to watch TV dramas like Kangxi Dynasty and Yongzheng Dynasty when he was free. His head teacher, Ms. Han, who accompanied them, said of him that “He reads a lot and is called ‘little doctor’ by his classmates” (GAT, 2003). By chance, GAB’s grandparents were both professors at Sichuan Agricultural University and located in Ya’an before their retirement. GAGF was a professor of ecology and crop science, and GAGM majored in animal husbandry. For professional reasons, we talked a little more about the changes in food and the intergenerational relationships reflected in the changes. On this subject, GAGF had a lot to say.

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You just asked GAB if he likes McDonald’s and KFC. Of course he does. For all his talk of history, he is no different from any other boy his age, and also likes McDonald’s, KFC and all kinds of snacks. His mother first brought him to Guangzhou two years ago, when his father was still in Chengdu. His mother had to work and take care of him at the same time, so she naturally often took him to patronize the fast food restaurants, which I was strongly against. But her mother said it was always awkward for a mother to take a child to a formal restaurant, while McDonald’s and KFC were much more casual. I agree. Actually, I have found that GAB likes these fast food restaurants not only because the chicken wings or hamburgers are delicious, but also because he likes the culture and free atmosphere there. While his mother ate and read the newspaper, he played with the children inside. You’re not so comfortable in a Chinese restaurant, are you? In fact, in addition to western fast food, GAB is also the complete book of our family in terms of food. His mother listens to him whenever she chooses snacks or buys food, and sometimes she just lets him go to the supermarket shopping. He gets Dove’s chocolate, Häagen-Dazs ice creams, Pringles potato chips, and even when dad smokes, GAB would tell him to buy the low-tar cigarettes. How does he know? He does it mainly through two channels: First, by watching TV. He pays attention to TV ads that we’re not interested in; and second, through communication between students. He not only exchanges food with his classmates, but also sometimes brings a little home and asks us, “Isn’t this delicious?” Of course, it is delicious. When we were little, what else could you eat except a bowl of bean jelly or a handful of fried beans? Nowadays, delicious food from all over the world is available in Guangzhou, some of which even I, a professor of crop science, have never heard of. (GAGF, 2003) GAGF’s remarks touch on the inheritance and change of food culture. Apparently, in the youth of the 67-year-old retired professor, and even in the youth of his son GAF, the scarcity of food was accompanied by its monotony of variety. Before 1978, it could be said that for thousands of years, the Chinese dinner table was full of steamed buns, rolls, and rice porridge, and for both adults and children, snacks were little more than fried fava beans or popcorn.5 I remember Chang Guangzhi wrote in the preface to Food in Chinese Culture: An Anthropological and Historical Perspective that compared with other cultural issues such as clothing, residence, transportation, and communication, the Chinese nation, especially the Han nationality, has undergone little change in food structure, food principles, cooking methods, dining styles, and even food concepts for thousands of years, and the continuity greatly exceeds the vicissitudes (Chang, 1977). One of the most important reasons why Chinese national food culture changes very slowly is that the long history of farming civilization has immobilized the food structure, and rice has become the main or only food source. It is this, I think, that leads to two other enduring features of Chinese food culture. For one thing, as a supplement or a relief from monotony, the Chinese are not picky about foods other than rice,

160 Artifact power not to be neglected which is relatively rare. Animals, such as birds and jerboa reptiles, plants, such as mushrooms, and grass roots are the diet of the Chinese people. In the words of Lin Yutang, “we are also the only animals on earth that eat everything” (Lin, 2000: 325). For another thing, whether it is a monotonous food like rice or other omnivorous food to supplement or adjust, the nation has to make great effort to harmonize its taste, which is why Chinese culture breeds world-class cooking techniques. In fact, not only in Chinese society, but even in the Western world before the Industrial Revolution, changes of food or diet were very slow. In his threevolume book Material Civilization, Economics and Capitalism in the 15th and 18th Centuries, Fernand Braudel, based on the idea that nothing may change for a thousand years in the history of food, divides humanity’s long food history into two revolutionary phases. The first revolution occurred in the Paleolithic age. With the development of hunting, human beings changed from omnivores to carnivores, and it is the acquisition of this characteristic that enables man to obtain abundant animal protein. The second revolution was the agricultural one in the Neolithic age, that is, in 6,000–7,000 BC, when the cultivation of grain made humans turn to plant-based food. In particular, since then, two opposing groups have formed in human history: a few people who eat meat, and the majority who eat noodles, batter, and cooked tubers (Braudel, 1992: 120–121). In fact, as the Industrial Revolution has spread across the globe in recent centuries, it has begun to shape another, or a third, food revolution. In the industrialized countries, it has become a reality that most people eat meat. It is worth pointing out that it is precisely because diet is a culture that changes most slowly that food becomes, as the anthropologist James Watson puts it, an appropriate lens through which we can track and observe social and cultural change (Watson, 2000: 199). From our research point of view, this lens can benefit us a lot. First of all, we can see that during the past 40 years, along with the growth of China’s economy, especially the growth of household income, and the full opening of the country to the Western world, the dinner table of Chinese people has become much more abundant than ever before. Here “abundance” refers not only to the increase in quantity, compared to the lack of food and clothing before 1978, but also to the increase in quality and the variety of well-made and well-packaged foods, from domestic to imported. The rapid change of food in a generation reflects the fact that the social changes of the nation in the past 42 years are far more than in the previous 300 years. Second, changes in the miniaturization of family structure and the implementation of the one-child policy since the 1980s have made children the center of Chinese families. This change not only led to the popularity of all kinds of food for children, and the food industry almost becoming a children’s industry, but also led to children becoming the center of family consumption and to the decisionmaking power of diets shifting “from the elders to the juniors” (Watson, 2000: 202). Many families consume food for only one purpose: that of the title of a book: Feeding China’s Little Emperors (Jing, 2000). Third, across generations, the direction of food knowledge, like all knowledge, begins to reverse: from junior to senior. This shift occurs because “the parents’ and grandparents’ understanding of children’s

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food, especially the understanding of the meaning of food under the domination of consumerism, is often acquired from children” (Guo, 1998). In this reversed socialization or cultural reverse of food, the younger generation leads the older generation in tasting cheese steak, eating hamburgers, drinking coffee, chewing gum, tasting whiskey, and so on. By connecting with foreign cultures and modernity, the younger generation “are drawing their elders into an intersection of local society and transnationalism” (Lozada, 2000: 133).

The giants and dwarves in the electronic world Human history is continuous, but in the eyes of historians it is intermittent. There have always been great people or events that have become discontinuous turns or points that make later history radically different from previous history. In the 5,000 years of Chinese civilization, there have been at least three great transitions or nodes in the communication or dissemination of culture, and all of these have occurred in the last 1,000 years. The first turning point was the advent of printing. During the Qingli period of the Song dynasty (AD 1041–1048), Bi Sheng was the first Chinese to produce mud movable type printing. Four centuries later, the German Gutenberg produced movable type with lead alloy, laying the foundation for modern metal printing. However, the influence of printing is not limited to the publication of books. In fact, “printing represented the birth of a machine process based on uniform repeatability; as such, it provided a model for subsequent developments of mass production and for the standardization of goods and knowledge” (Czitrom, 1982: 158). So we can look at the advent of printing as a sign of the mechanical age. In this sense, the camera, invented by the Frenchman L. Daguerre in 1839, and the automobile, invented by the German Carl Benz in 1886, are also symbols of the triumph of the mechanical age. The second turning point was the emergence of electronic media: the cable telegraph invented by the American Samuel Morse in 1844 became a most important historical event. Telegraph was the first medium that allowed information to travel faster than the human body. It broke the historical link between transportation and communication. Moreover, the function of telegraph was that it created an anonymous, context-free world of information (Postman, 2004: 101–103). Its advent directly stimulated the invention of the telephone, radio, and television. In 1876, the American Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. In 1920, on the basis of the attempt to use the wireless telegraph to send sound, the American electrical company Westinghouse pioneered the first commercial radio (Butsch, 2007: 174). In 1929, British scientist John Logie Baird successfully produced the world’s first television in London, and in 1938, the world’s first television station appeared, which soon became the giant in the living room of millions of households, turning human leisure, culture, and education upside down (Butsch, 2007: 250). The combination of this electronic and image revolution, in Neil Postman’s words, makes childhood—“which came into being as the new medium of print imposed divisions between children and adults”—disappear (Postman, 2004: 9).

162 Artifact power not to be neglected The third turning point occurred in recent decades, through the digitization of electronic media. The technical factors behind this were numerous, including at least the following. First, the increasing miniaturization of electronic computers after World War II. Second, the application of the Internet developed from ARPANET founded by DARPA in 1969 (Castells, 2007: 10–40). Third, since the beginning of “Synchro III” in 1964, there are now more and more mature space communication satellites, as well as optical fiber communication technology. Finally, video technology emerged as the latest and most spectacular electrical extension of our central nervous system (McLuhan, 2000: 390). The combination of these technologies has led to the emergence of new forms of media and electronic products based on power technologies since the 1980s: digital WebTV, digital cameras, emails, blogs, WeChat, online games, media players (MP3s, MP4s, and MP5s), and mobile phones, to name a few. In less than 1,000 years, aside from the initial turn led by the Chinese, subsequent developments have all been driven by the European and American world. In addition, due to the backwardness of China in modern times and the isolation of the country after 1949, cameras, radios, telephones, record players, air conditioners, and automobiles were excluded from the lives of ordinary Chinese people before the reform and opening-up in 1978. I remember well that before 1976 my parents had only one really decent appliance in their house—a Panda radio.6 At the time, as a high school freshman, I was so obsessed with radio that I could already install my own superheterodyne radio made up of seven diodes. But L., who lived in the same compound, had a three-band pocket radio worth 100 CNY from his grandfather, who was then the minister of naval operations, making all the children of our age envious. The change happened after 1976. I remember that we first bought a 120 CNY electric fan at home, and then a 300 CNY black-and-white TV set, and what happened next has not faded from everyone’s memory: After 1978, with the deepening of the reforms and opening-up, and the rapid development of China’s economy, scientific and civilizing creations, including those I have mentioned, flooded into China and the daily life of the Chinese people almost overnight. Take cars for example. Even 20 years ago, there were only five cars for every 1,000 Chinese people, but today China is the world’s number one car producer—the annual production of 28 million cars means that there are 170 more cars per 1,000 people. Foreigners may not understand why so many Chinese struggle to learn to drive in their 40s and 50s. Actually, it’s very simple. The generation that grew up in the scarcity economy before 1978 are simply trying to catch the “tail of youth”, and it is this kind of indomitable compensation psychology that produces their very disproportionate tenacity. The instant emergence of various electronic products and durable consumer goods in China has, of course, greatly improved the quality of life of the people, and also caused waves of popularity of these products and the culture they represent—in the last 42 years, Sanyo radio recorders, karaoke machines, and mobile phones are the best examples. However, from the perspective of social psychology, or from the perspective of intergenerational relations, the

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emergence and popularization of these electronic products or durable consumer goods have also directly created different poles in modern society. Born in this era, the younger generation, who are able to handle electronic products extremely naturally and skillfully, are indeed the “giants”. In contrast, their grandparents or parents, who were born in times of war, or when the nation had “only one head to think”, when there was a poverty of life and cruel political struggle, are “midgets” in today’s age of intellectual supremacy, especially in the face of various and endless electronic products. Thus, between these “giants” and “midgets”, there is an almost daily light comedy of cultural reverse revolving around the use of various electronic products. NBG is my sister’s daughter, and their family is one of the first group of nine families I interviewed in Nanjing when I was engaged in cultural reverse research in 1998. In addition to the convenience of selecting one’s own relatives for interview, the real reason is that my sister lived in my parents’ home for the first few years after she got married, so I watched her daughter NBG grow up. In addition, I have no children, so I always regard NBG as my own child. My brother-in-law NBF is a military man, and he is usually not at home, so I had a lot of contact with NBG in her childhood. Much of my perceptual knowledge about children and even teenagers came from NBG during the period we were all living at my parents’ house. Because adults had to go to work, I noticed that at home NBG was both a “burden” on her grandparents (they devoted a lot of work to her) and a “helper” to them. From the age of six or seven until she left her grandparents’ home when she was in middle school, her main help to her grandparents was the operation of various electrical appliances—she was almost like a part-time electrical engineer to them. Since the age of four or five, NBG had been curious about all kinds of electrical appliances and always disconnected the plug when the adults were not paying attention, making them break out in a cold sweat. But once she was in elementary school, her “function” became apparent. There were many buttons for the washing machine in the home, which needed to be chosen not only for washing mode or drying time, but also for fabric type, and cold or hot water. The grandparents felt dizzy after reading the manual and could only ask her for help. For example, grandma was from Hangzhou, and liked listening to Yue opera or Pingtan, which became much easier once she got a tape recorder in the 1980s, except that NBG had to be around, because she was the only one who knew how to choose between radio, recording, and playback. She also knew how to fast forward or fast rewind, or to choose the section grandma wanted to listen to. After taking possession of a color TV set in the home later, the grandparents could not live without NBG. In those days, when there was no Internet TV, channels would drift, causing viewing glitches. Then whenever the TV at home broke down, grandma NBGM would shout, “NBG, the television isn’t working normally again. Quickly come to adjust it.” In this respect, not to mention the grandparents, even her mother NBM later said, “After we moved into NBF’s unit, she was still in charge of the appliances. For example, if NBG wasn’t at home, we would just use the ‘start’ and ‘defrost’ buttons on the microwave” (NBM, 1998).

164 Artifact power not to be neglected NBG, now already 26 years old, entered Beijing TV station to act as a compere after graduation from the Beijing Broadcasting Institute. In Beijing, in addition to the long distance to travel to work, she also had to go to many places to interview every day, so it was very inconvenient to have no car. So the year after her graduation, when her mother changed car, NBG asked for the old one. Traffic was so heavy in Beijing that, at first, her parents worried about her safety, not to mention that her grandparents objected to her driving. Not long after she drove, I went to Beijing on a business trip. When I got out of the airport, I saw her standing far away. She had come to meet me. When I got in the car, I found that, although she had been driving the car for three months and it was a car with manual transmission, her skills were far more delicate than mine, I who had been driving for more than ten years, but whose hands and feet were stiff. I was particularly surprised that NBG displayed a good sense of space in a viaduct, a tunnel, a fifth ring, and a third ring. Even I, who go to Beijing more times a year than to the commercial center in Nanjing, was surprised that she knew her way around. That day, NBG invited me to eat Häagen-Dazs in an ice cream shop outside Jianguomen and said: I remember you asking me that question in 1998, when I was 16. I remember what you were most interested in was why we kids are so good at so many things, especially with all kinds of appliances. I think, in addition to interest— because children are always curious about things they haven’t seen—it’s courage. For example, when my dad just bought a computer, he treated it as a treasure, and I was not allowed to push any buttons. I argued with him, “Why don’t you let me push them? That’s what buttons are for! Why else are there so many buttons?” This was because we were born in the 1980s, which is now commonly referred to as the “post-80s”, when all kinds of electrical appliances flooded out. Buttons are part of our way of life, and as you say, we are the generation that grew up pushing buttons. I remember you telling me, when I was a little kid, to do more. When you were in medicine, a lot of the hands-on boys in anatomy turned out to be surgeons, and many of the girl students who stood by with their anatomy books in their hands while the boys were doing it are prescribing aspirin despite their academic success. I remember when I was little you used to buy me all kinds of boys’ toys to load and unload, like cars, tanks, cannons, and transformers, and grandma said for this reason that you bought toys regardless of gender. I think this is the unique experience of our generation, especially the post-80s urban girls! But then again, I’m good at operating appliances, computers, cell phones, or driving a car, but I’m still no match for cousin NBG. According to his level, he should be an IT talent, right? I now have to ask him to remotely control the computer in Nanjing for me if I want to do something “big”, such as refreshing the interface for iPhone 4s or downloading software through “jail breaking”, or installing software for iPhones and iPads through a computer. He is not good at study, but his practical ability is really first class. (NBG, 2010)

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In fact, operational ability is no longer differentiated by gender. For one thing, many urban families now have only one child, so parents often raise their daughters as sons, from giving them the same vision as boys, to asking them to do manual support work. For another, because parents consciously cultivate girls’ sense of independence and practical ability, at least those girls in cities now have many opportunities to operate, and they are often as good as men in practical skills. During the interview in Shanghai, we met SJG, an 11-year-old sixth-grader from a primary school. SJG, who lives in Shanghai’s Hongkou district, joined her school’s robot training team two years ago with the encouragement of her teacher. At first, her parents just wanted her to get to know more schoolmates and enrich her extracurricular life. Unexpectedly this quiet but quickwitted little girl demonstrated a gift for automatic control and spatial awareness, and her performance continued to improve all the time. In 2014 she won the VEXIQ engineering challenge, the Eighth Asian Robotics Competition.7 Even her father, SJF, who was engaged in such complicated technical work as forging and testing railway rails, said repeatedly: I didn’t expect that. I thought I could get my kids to socialize more, but I didn’t expect her to be the Asian champion. In addition, she used to have no interest in mathematics, but now her understanding of geometry has been significantly improved. (SJF, 2014) NBG and SJG are not alone. During my visit to Beijing, I spent a lot of time with BR’s family, who gave me a lot of help. I met BRF in 1999 when I was visiting the Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard University, and BRF, an ethnographer, happened to be at the Harvard-Yenching society. The discipline is similar, which made us friends who talked about everything when we were in America. When I was doing interviews in Beijing in 2004–2005, I naturally turned to BRF, especially because his university, the Central University for Nationalities, had a lot of minority faculty—the Mongolian BCF couple mentioned in Chapter 4 were introduced by BRF. At the beginning, I did not plan to interview the BRF family, because my interest in the Central University for Nationalities was the ethnic families there. But one Sunday night, while chatting at his home, BRF mentioned a small thing that really got me interested in this family of three. The topic BRF was talking about was triggered by the fact that he was correcting undergraduate students’ homework in the afternoon. An undergraduate sociology major at his university had written a course paper on the impact of the Japanese animation industry, also known as anime, on Chinese animation art. BRF, while aware of the popularity of animation art, of several animated films released in the 1980s, including Astro Boy, Smart Ikkyu, and Transformers, and even aware of the fact that China’s animation industry began in 1926 with the short film The Studio by the Wan Laiming brothers in Shanghai, he was totally ignorant of the specific situation of the Japanese animation industry and its influence on the Chinese one. Therefore, BRF wanted the help of his son BRB, who had always been interested

166 Artifact power not to be neglected in animation art, and so handed over the homework paper to him to help him judge it. As a result, the son looked at the article and said it was too general. Although BRF knew his son, who had been subscribing to specialist magazines for years, would not be fooled, he couldn’t believe the 17-year-old’s response. “Be specific,” he told him. BRB was encouraged: Your student is not familiar with the development of Japanese animation. There are many important works and events that are not mentioned. For example, Cosmic Battleship Greatly released in 1974 was the first superdramatic film in Japanese animation. Matsumoto Zero was responsible for the script and character design, and formed the “Matsumoto Zero whirlwind” after broadcasting. All over Japan, people stayed at home and watched it, so it’s definitely a national film. For example, he said Iron Man 28 sucks. Is that true? That depends on when you look at it. Now it seems a little bad, but at that time it was quite creative and quite sensational. So, I think these films should be judged through the lens of history. What do you think? (BRB, 2005) Although BRB said “What do you think?”, BRF already knew he had “nothing to say”. But what could he say? If he did not need his son’s help in film, television, and animation, BRF would not have handed over all kinds of video materials or video files shot by him when he was engaged in ethnology research to his son for editing when he was in high school. Interestingly, the interaction or communication between the “giant” and the “midget” in BR’s family not only gave the latter specific help, but also made him broaden his horizons, and even gave him a very unique insight into the phenomenon of “cultural reverse” that I studied. I think the reason why I am inferior to my son can be found in the process of cultural enculturation of anthropology. As a general rule, human learning progresses gradually, but as we get older, the rules become more numerous and the patterns of thinking become established. Teenagers like BRB, on the other hand, are already hands-on and thoughtful, with relatively few rules. So, they see something new and they think about it in different ways, and they figure out how to operate it. Adults are afraid of “trouble” when dealing with new things, but children are not afraid, because the so-called “trouble” is sometimes just a break in the rules. I think that’s probably why there are generational differences. How to eliminate or narrow the gap between generations? I think what you call “cultural reverse” is indeed a way. Of course, I agree that the premise of cultural reverse is to affirm that the influence of parents on children still exists, but this influence has changed from one-way to two-way or even multidirectional. That is to say, intergenerational interaction is increasingly an interactive process, which, in the words of Edmund Husserl, is intersubjective. When it comes to BRB, not only can we learn a lot from our son that we don’t understand, especially when it comes to the operation of various

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electrical appliances, but their teachers also benefit a lot from their interaction with their children. Last year, for example, BRB started his sophomore year in high school and let us know when he came back that he got a “promotion”. His “official position” is something we did not have when we were young, and is really “with the times”. It is called “electronic equipment commissary”, responsible for all kinds of electronic education equipment in the class. Each class that he is in is equipped with a variety of electronic education equipment now, including at least a computer, an object projector, a large projection screen, a TV, and a tape recorder, and some even have acoustics and power amplifiers. An “electronic equipment commissary” is needed because many teachers, especially older ones, don’t know how to handle these devices. The geography teacher in his class, for example, doesn’t even know how to turn on a computer, but he needs computers and projection equipment most of all, because he doesn’t need to carry maps or photos with him. Therefore, before each class, the teacher would contact BRB in advance and ask him to help adjust the equipment, so he is the teacher’s favorite student. I think this is a good example of “cultural reverse”, right? (BRF, 2005) In fact, in addition to the various audio-visual equipment we have talked about, including computers, I have found in the surveys and interviews over the past ten years, whether in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Guangzhou, or Chongqing, in front of DVDs, VCDs, stereos, mobile phones (and pagers), fax machines, scanners, digital players (MP3s, MP4s, MP5s), digital cameras, and even microwave ovens, air conditioners, TV sets, tape recorders, washing machines, and other kinds of new appliances with electronic technology as the core, basically all parents’ knowledge and practical ability fall greatly behind that of their children. For example, as early as 1995, the V family in the “Zhejiang village” of Beijing had mobile phones, but BVF and BVM could not use them, and they had to ask their son or daughter to put them through before they could speak to anyone else (BVF, 1995). Similarly, the fax machine of the F family in Nanjing was only used by the son, so he was responsible for sending and receiving faxes for his father NFF (NFF, 1998). So, back in 1998, after the NBG interview, I wrote: In fact, the biggest backwardness is still coming: Faced with the initial wave of cars entering the family, all parents over 40 may have realized that their children will be the “driving generation” and they will only be the “riding generation”. (Zhou, 2000a) I think this awareness of parents can explain why, after 2000, there was a large number of middle-aged people in Chinese cities “learning to drive”. The reason is simple. The drop in the price of cars after China joined the WTO is part of the learning boom; it is also a succession of children sitting in the automobile cab that drives or stimulates parents to satisfy a desire to drive after middle age.

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The mobile phone: mobility bridges gaps Apart from computers, which we will discuss at the end, the mobile phone, or cell phone, is perhaps the most representative example of generational difference. In English, we can speak of mobile phones or cell phones. “Mobile phone” is more accurate. For the first time, mobile phones have enabled people to stay in close contact with the outside world while on the move or away from their homes, offices, and even their cars. “Cell phone” is more vivid because of the three meanings of a cell. First, it is like a “cell”, capable of generating new societies, new possibilities, and new relationships wherever it goes. Second, it is like a “beehive”, which makes us feel crowded and almost losing the space for independent survival. Finally, it is more like something in which we are imprisoned: “in a cell of omni-accessibility” (Levinson, 2004: xiii). The director Feng Xiaogang’s adaptation of Liu Zhenyun’s novel The Mobile Phone has done a fantastic interpretation of this point. In the 1970s, when Bell was working on the car phone, Motorola was more interested in the pocket-size phone— the mobile phone; in 1973 the first call from a small mobile phone was made. Before 1995, it weighed two pounds and cost as much as 4,000 USD or 30,000 CNY, which earned it a very fancy name in Hong Kong—“Big brother”. In fact, regarding the topic we are discussing now, I prefer to think of “mobile” as intergenerational movement, where the dominant power of communication moves from the previous generation to the next generation. In a sense, it is with mobile phones that the younger generation perform a leap of life. The push for human communication by cell phones or mobile phones is indisputable and cannot be overstated, so I agree with Paul Levinson, in the “McLuhan of the digital age” that: “In the long run, the Internet may be seen as an adjunct of the cell phone. Physical mobility-plus-connectivity through the world—what the cell phone brings us—may be more revolutionary” (Levinson, 2004: 8). But for all Levinson’s research on mobile phones, he has yet to discover, in the absence of research on a large developing country, in China’s middle and low income groups, that the mobile phone is not so much a communication technology as a means of livelihood, or even an entertainment tool.8 When it comes to making a living from mobile phones, it is natural to mention previous studies that have shown that low- and middle-income groups use mobile phones to boost economic activity. For example, Tanzanian fishermen can use mobile phones to easily collect weather information, enhance cooperation in fishing, deal with emergencies, and improve the bargaining power of seafood (Myhr & Nordstrom, 2006). Migrant workers in India, Mozambique, and Tanzania use mobile phones to respond to emergencies, maintain family relationships, and save living expenses (Souter et al., 2005). Small businessmen in Rwanda can better broaden their business vision and adjust their working place and procedures by using mobile phones (Donner, 2005: 39). Similarly, Chinese workers can easily obtain employment information sent by friends, former workers, and employers by using mobile phones (Ngan & Ma, 2008). However, our study further confirms that, in today’s China, where the floating

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population, especially migrant workers, constitute the backbone of the social structure, mobile phones not only improve the work efficiency of middle- and low-income groups, but also directly become their livelihood tools (Zhu, 2011). The entertainment functions of mobile phones are related to their increasingly powerful and diverse accessory functions. We know that in addition to the basic functions of calling and texting, which are related to communication, current mobile phone functions include photography, radio, tape recorder, MP3/MP4, TV, Internet, email, mobile phone QQ, games, alarm clock, calendar, map, compass, computer, MMS, Bluetooth, timer, notepad, calendar, U disk, electronic book, flashlight, and dictionaries. Although not all of these additional functions are purely for entertainment, we can assume that most of them have some kind of broad-sense entertainment function for those who live a monotonous life away from home, because people often fiddle with them to kill time when they are bored. For example, our study found that workers like to listen to music, watch and download TV or movies, and chat on QQ through mobile phones (Zhu, 2011). Zheng Taisong, in his research on the new generation of migrant workers in the Pearl River delta, also found that mobile QQ is a regular means for them to maintain real or virtual relationships with different people in their spare time and even during working hours. In the words of the hotel manager, A Ying, “Our dormitory has only four walls and nothing to play with. It’s really boring! (Therefore) I will be on mobile QQ when I go back to my dormitory after work every day” (Zheng, 2010). Zhu Hong argues that the rapid development of mobile phones or mobile technologies in China is not only due to the rapid growth of social GDP, but also due to the rapid increase of the population mobility rate of this country of 1.3 billion people in the past 30 years. According to statistics, until 1978, before the reform and opening-up, the floating population in China was only 5.6 million due to the household registration system, employment system, and grain and oil supply system; the turnover rate was only 0.66% of the total population (Duan et al., 2008). However, after the reform and opening-up, the above phenomena have changed rapidly: the floating population rose to 50 million in 1988, and soon rose to 100 million after Deng Xiaoping’s “southern tour speech” in 1992. Now the floating population, which mainly consists of migrant workers, has reached 210 million (The Floating Population Department of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, 2010). It can be said that the reality of migration paves the way for the popularization of mobile technology, which is becoming more and more perfect. Looking at the growth of urban and rural mobile phones in China in recent years, especially the growth rate of fixed phones and mobile phones, can confirm the above views. According to statistics, at the beginning of the reform and opening-up, there were only 2.14 million telephones in China, with a penetration rate of 0.38%. Twenty years later, the number had increased to 108 million in 1999 and reached a peak of 368 million in 2006. But it has since fallen, to 191 million in 2019. Compared with landlines, mobile phones are a latecomer. In 1987, when mobile phones were first used in China, the total

170 Artifact power not to be neglected number of users was only 3,200 (units), then 18,000 in 1990, then 43 million in 1999, before surpassing fixed telephone users for the first time in 2003 (at 269 million units to 263 million fixed telephone units) (Guo & Wu, 2008). In 2019 mobile phone units reached 1.6 billion. Not only is growth far outstripping that of landlines, but the frequency with which mobile phones are being used has left landlines far behind. According to statistics, in the first six months of 2010, the cumulative call time of fixed telephones in mainland China was 3,776,532 million minutes, while the cumulative call time of mobile phones was 206,130,207 million minutes, which is 55 times that of the former (National Bureau of Statistics, 2010). The rapid growth of mobile phones has further highlighted the intellectual tension and level differences between the digital “midget” and “giant”. When I conducted interviews on the phenomenon of “cultural reverse”, almost all families told me that, compared with their children, parents were extremely incompetent in operating mobile phones, especially in sending text messages, which constituted one of the basic functions they learned from their children. In 2005, when I was doing research in Beijing, I paid a special visit to Professor Guo Yuhua from the sociology department of Tsinghua University. Professor Guo, who has a special interest in anthropology, has been interested in cultural inheritance and its manifestation in human society for many years, and her conclusion in 1998 about the influence of children’s food choices on their parents was very enlightening to my research (Guo, 1998; Zhou, 2000a). While discussing the topic of cultural reverse, she naturally talked about a study she was working on at the time. Her research was aimed at discussing the construction of “private domain” and the formation of personal relationships by investigating the use of mobile phones by middle school students in Beijing. I think the phenomenon of “cultural reverse” you put forward is definitely not a myth. It is definitely a more and more prominent and clear social reality. When I started to do research on food inheritance in 1994, this phenomenon was not obvious. Later, with the popularization of computers, Internet and mobile phones, the direction of knowledge inheritance began to change, that is to say, there was what you call “cultural reverse”. Mobile phones, for example. Kids use their phones better than their parents, and many of the high school students we studied in Beijing have the ability of “blind texting”. In class, they can send text messages without looking at the phone screen under their desks in order to keep the teachers in the dark. And the younger they are, the better they are. Some of my graduate students are also very good at using mobile phones, but they are still not as good as those in middle school. I’m even worse. I don’t like to use my cell phone, and only take one with me when I’m on a business trip. I didn’t know how to send text messages before, because I thought it was too troublesome, but I couldn’t do without sending text messages for the project. Those students didn’t want to call, so they sent text messages to you, which forced me to learn from them how to receive and send text messages.

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Furthermore, the use of this mobile phone is related to the construction of children’s personal space. I mentioned before that I don’t like using mobile phones. In the sociology department of Tsinghua University, I am probably the only one who doesn’t use mobile phones. The administrative personnel of the department said to me, “Ms. Guo, you are the only one in our department who doesn’t use mobile phones. We can’t find you.” I said, “What are you going to find me for? If I’m not at home, I’m at school, or I’m on the way from home to school. You can find me at home or at school, but you don’t have to find me when I’m on the way. Why should I be found everywhere?” That’s my idea of privacy. In a word, I don’t want to be disturbed. However, children are different. They are always under the supervision of teachers and parents, so they think that with mobile phones, they can partially avoid such supervision and construct their own private domain and space. For example, we just talked about “blind texting”. Without this “skill”, he would not be able to establish such a private space under the teacher’s eyes. (Interview with Guo, 2005) Guo Yuhua’s research experience is very similar to mine. More than once in our studies, we’ve heard parents say they regret whatever they buy for their kids, especially mobile phones, TVs, and computers. Parents’ chagrin stems from the fact that they bought these devices for a completely different purpose from what they are used for, and from the fact that their awkwardness in the face of these devices makes them helpless against their children’s deviant behavior. In my research travels, I have been told by more than one parent that they sometimes have to lock up the cable to keep their children from watching TV, and to control their access to the Internet, by every means possible (NBM, 1998; BUF, 2004). Take mobile phones. Almost all parents buy mobile phones for their children to better “monitor” them, to know what they are doing, and to be able to call them anytime and anywhere. A comparative study of mobile phone use between China and Japan confirms that the top three reasons why Chinese parents give their children mobile phones are “for parents to keep in touch with children” (50%), “for children to communicate” (44.2%), and “for children to keep in touch with family and friends” (40.4%) (Bai, Yang & Mou, 2008). All these three answers actually mean the same thing: not allowing children to get out of control. The children themselves say they have no way to communicate with their families without mobile phones, so in this case, parents have to pay for them. However, with the mobile phone, the situation is completely different: When the parents really want to find their children, they turn off the mobile phone, and if the parents ask them what is wrong, they will say the phone is out of power. Moreover, thanks to the mobile phone, especially the SMS function, children construct an effective private space free from interference from elders. More than one parent admitted in our interview that it is not that they did not want to see what their kids were saying to each other, but they could not. Sometimes it was even harder than trying to open the children’s locked drawers.

172 Artifact power not to be neglected There are many reasons why parents want to check their children’s text messages but can’t. First of all, most parents are not very clear about the SMS function of their mobile phones. Second, children naturally take precautions against their parents; so not only do they often “lock” their phones, but important messages are sent and deleted so that the parents can’t see them at all. Third, children have their own Internet and mobile language, so even if parents happen to see their children’s text messages, they often do not understand what they are saying. For example, they would write “Hiz nat mai tipe” instead of “He’s not my type”. How could you possibly understand that? Unless you are a young sociologist, of course you do not understand. The problem is that what you might think of as ungrammatical text messages or Internet language is now becoming more popular among young people. At a time when the adult world is showing signs of incompetence, frustration, and even dissatisfaction, these kids are excited, focused, and happy as never before. We can discuss the natural coincidence of mobile phone or mobile technology and youth subculture from the perspective of “embeddedness” put forward by the Hungarian economist Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation (1944). In Polanyi’s view, market embedding in society is a universal law and essential attribute of human history, because normally human economies are stuck in human social relationships (Polanyi, 2001: 48, 279). Although Polanyi did not systematically explain the concept of embeddedness, the rich theoretical tension contained in the concept itself still leaves a lot of room for imagination. Sociologist Mark Granovetter proposed that economic action in the market must be embedded in the social structure (Granovetter, 1985). Everett M. Rogers, a communication scientist, also believes that a technology is usually embedded in a social structure, which influences the invention, development, and diffusion of technology and its effect on society (Rogers, 1994: 510). If the aforementioned Zhu Hong’s study reveals that the popularization and diffusion of modern mobile technology in China is influenced by the high rate of population turnover and the large number of middle and low income groups who make a living by physical strength, the popularity of mobile phone or mobile technology in the youth group must be related to the basic characteristics of youth subculture in addition to the natural advantages and interests of the younger generation in the handling of utensils. Almost from the day when youth in the modern sense was born, people think that young people are naturally alienated from and rebelling against society, which is actually caused by the separation between the modern education or school system that young people must stay in for a certain period of time and the modern production or industrial system. Such separation makes the youth group form a youth culture which is quite different from the mainstream institutional culture. Its basic feature is to seek to maintain a certain degree of relative independence from the mainstream culture. Therefore, they are always skeptical of and resistant to the mainstream system of modern society, including the factory system, the market system, the organization system, the education system, and even the family system, as well as the top-down communication and operation mode present in the different departments and levels of responsibility in modern systems.

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In a sense, the point-to-point decentralized communication technology of mobile phones provides conditions for the equal communication that the younger generation yearns for and adapts to. In explaining why mobile phones are more popular in less institutionalized developing countries, Hans Geser argues that they are distinctive in two ways. On the one hand, as an effective technology, it puts the power of communication into the hands of individuals; on the other hand, as a result of its mobility, it shifts communication from fixed and formal institutional channels to decentralized, individual networks at the social level as a whole (Geser, 2006). This view is equally and even more applicable to the interpretation of youth and youth culture. In the world of young people, not only are there no hierarchical systems and formal channels of communication, but they are used to service their aspiration to be their own masters and respond to demands from others and society, all of which are very consistent with the characteristics of mobile phones. As for the pros and cons of mobile phones, take a look at 100 years of electronic media. You can see that almost every new medium or product comes along with a vigorous debate about its justice implications. As early as 1910, McKeever pointed out that movies are schools for cultivating criminals, because they are even more decadent than cheap novels, and their manifestation is not in words but flesh and blood, thus achieving direct indoctrination of the senses (McKeever, 1910). Then, when television became the indispensable “companion” of human beings, Mary Wynn compared it to drugs, because it made children addicted (Wynn, 1977). Five years later, Wynn’s views caught on with Neil Postman, who wrote in his 1982 book The Disappearance of Childhood: “It is through television that we can clearly see how and why the historical foundations of the distinction between childhood and adulthood have been destroyed” (Postman, 2004: 108). It is only natural, then, that one should also look warily at the more popular mobile phone or mobile technology to see how much it threatens and deconstructs the existing structures and rules of human society. In this regard, the usual criticism consists of two aspects. First, it has to do with Geser’s “decentralization” of mobile phones. It is noted that the sending and receiving behavior of complete individuality may lead to the fragmentation of audience structure and experience, while the loss of commonness is not conducive to the cultivation of the common experience of human society. Second, SMS brings convenience to human communication, but the simplification and infinite replication of SMS symbols make the symbols themselves lose meaning and depth, becoming a “code of dead meaning” or a “carnival of the signifier” (Yu, 2009). But it now appears that these criticisms and curses will not stop generations of electronic devices springing up or children from “owning” electronic media or products, including mobile phones, which they flock to like moths to a flame. Moreover, the bold argue that children, who have been victims of electronic media for 100 years, are leading the way in the use of text messages and other texts (Levinson, 2004: 98). But that is not the end of the story. Bigger challenges may lie ahead. If parents have been routed by all kinds of electronic media and products, then they will face the inevitable Waterloo of their lives—the computer.

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The computer, or the Waterloo of parents For all living parents, the real Waterloo of their upbringing was the advent and spread of the electronic computer. The reason we use the word Waterloo here to describe the failure of parents is that they are so thoroughly defeated in the face of computers against the younger generation. As midgets of the electronic world, parents have to acknowledge their children’s status as giants. In this world, there is no room for them to fight with their children. As long as they remain inert, parents will be convinced of their failure and admit that “the ability of a human to master a computer is inversely proportional to the age” (Yan & Bu, 1997: 27). This intergenerational struggle began 40 years ago, but only 30 years ago in China. In 1946, American scientists John Mauchley and J. Prespen Eckert produced the world’s first general-purpose computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator Calculator, in Philadelphia. It weighed 30 tons, was the size of a stadium, and was made of nine-foot-tall metal molds, including 70,000 resistors and 18,000 vacuum tubes. Because of its huge power consumption, it is said that all the lights in Philadelphia flickered the moment it was turned on. This invention was certainly novel, but if it were not for another invention in the field of microelectronics, the computer probably would not have had much contact with ordinary people. In 1971 Gerte Hofstede, an engineer at Intel, invented the microprocessor, successfully placing 2,300 transistors on a chip the size of a pushpin, turning “the electronics world, and indeed the world itself, upside down” (Castells, 2010: 42). Then, in 1975, Ed Roberts, an American engineer, built the microprocessor-centric Altair, the design basis for the Apple I. And Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, two other young dropouts in Silicon Valley, built Apple II in their parents’ garage, which became the first commercially successful computer. These magical stories later became symbols of the coming of the information age. In 1976, Apple Computer Inc. was founded, dedicated to the popularization of the microcomputer. In 1981, IBM, a leading company in the electronics industry, developed its own microcomputer and called it the Personal Computer (PC). After the 1980s, the shift to portable computing, with its unprecedented mobile capabilities, began to really change the way societies and organizations interacted. As personal computer use continued to expand, new software was developed. In 1976, shortly after the small personal computer was introduced, another talented dropout, Bill Gates of Harvard University, teamed up with fellow student Paul Allen to create the Microsoft company that would later dominate the global software industry. These efforts, coupled with the rapid development of the Internet based on ARPANET and the rapid development of coaxial cable and fiber optic technology, led to the rapid rise of a computer-based network society throughout the world after the 1990s. The reform and opening-up in 1978 has not only changed the lives and destinies of the Chinese people, but also seized the opportunity to rejuvenate the great nation. In 1980, when the above-mentioned electronic computer revolution was under way, many Western sociologists and futurologists were keenly aware

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of the new development trend predicted by the technological revolution. Sociologist Daniel Bell put forward in 1973 that the whole world was in the process of transforming from a commodity production society to an information or knowledge society due to the progress of science and technology (Bell, 1999: 487). In 1980, American futurologist Alvin Toffler divided the development of human society into three waves. The first wave began in the mid-18th century, marked by the widespread use of steam engines; the second wave began in the second half of the 19th century, marked by the generation of electric motors and the application of electricity; and the third wave appeared after World War II and was marked by the application of atomic energy, the birth and development of electronic computers, the exploration and development of outer space, and the extensive application of synthetic materials. To the delight of the newly opened China, Toffler predicted that in the race to the future, poor countries and rich countries were at the same starting line (Toffler, 1984: 550, 454).9 In 1990, as the telephone began to make great strides into Chinese homes, electronic computers began to become the favorite of the people, especially young intellectuals. I still remember that in 1992, several teachers in my department, including myself, used Intel 80286 (iAPX 286) computers, and we learned to start writing our own manuscripts in pinyin or the five-stroke input method. Soon, the Intel 80286 changed to Intel 80386, and then to Intel 80486. Later, after 1998, more and more fashionable people adopted portable laptop computers, and sending emails and reading materials through the Internet became the first choice of intellectuals, especially the younger generation. When I conducted the interviews on cultural reverse in the first group of seven households in Nanjing in 1998, the four middle-class households among them already had computers. Interestingly, although each of the four families had at least one college-educated parent who worked as a college teacher, a military officer, a bank clerk, a manager, or a judge, aging between 38 and 50, none of them could claim to have better computer knowledge than their children. For example, NFF, the father of family NF, is a professor of sociology. He often had his own unique views on various social problems, but he was always at a loss in the face of the continuous upgrading of computer software at home: The input software in the computer has been changed several times. Every time it was changed, I got mad at NFB, because all the things that I had learned were changed. Then I had to ask him to teach me again which key is which function. To tell you the truth, the new software is really good. I’m just worried when he’s going to change it again. (NFF, 1998) By contrast, NAF, a young professor of aesthetics, was good at computer science for his generation because he was good at English and willing to study it. He used his computer for writing, typesetting, printing, surfing the Internet, and emailing, but when it came to arranging software, file downloads, web pages, or remote logins, he still gave in to his son:

176 Artifact power not to be neglected I am not the only one who is not as good as my son. You can see that when the department wants to equip teachers with computers, each family’s son will issue the hardware “allocation list”, deciding the type of CPU, CD-ROM, MODEM, and the size of memory and hard disk. (NAF, 1998) Indeed, in front of a computer, parents are often, to put it bluntly, like NGF, the former pilot, who said, “They (children) can get whatever they want and we only pay the bills” (NGF, 1998). Soon after, as computers entered more and more homes, the experience began to become a common one in China. In the interview in Chongqing in early 2004, several families said that parents were no match for their children in the operation and learning of computers. CCB, a 16-year-old student in his second year of high school at Nankai Middle School, was excited about his experience with computers: When it comes to learning computer, my father and I are classmates. I was in grade 6 at the time, when Dad’s hospital trained them for the computer rank examination. Because the teacher they hired was from our school, with whom I was quite familiar, and, in addition, Mum was very busy working in the IRS, Dad often took me to attend computer training classes. And when it came time to practice, the adults at the table next to Dad were stunned. They all asked me for help. (CCB, 2004) Obviously, there is more than one bright kid like CCB today. CHM, a 48-yearold factory worker who retired early to work in sales, was as proud as ever to tell us about her daughter’s electronic and computer prowess: No matter what electrical appliances are bought at home, the task of operation is, of course, left to my daughter. I remember one time we bought a hands-free phone and her father, CHF, struggled to figure it out. When my daughter came home from school, she adjusted the time and display without any trouble, and laughed at her father, “Boss, what’s wrong with you?” And then she said to me, “Sister, you’re going to learn to use a computer. If you learn to surf the Internet, you will know the information of sales and marketing. How about I teach you to surf the net.” (CHM, 2004) Oddly, even though CHG, a sophomore at Qiujing High School, spoke to her parents in such a blunt way, neither her teachers nor her parents seemed to dislike her. In the words of mother CHM, Our child’s mind is much more open than ours, so we never put on the airs of parents. There are no social boundaries between us and her at home, so she is willing to tell us what happens in school and society. A girl who is

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smart as a boy on electronics and computers shows that the way we educate her doesn’t limit her personal development. (CHM, 2004) Such cases are common in Nanjing, Guangzhou, and Chongqing, and even more common in Beijing or Shanghai. During the interview in Beijing, I got to know the BS family. BSM, 49 years old, came from a family of senior cadres in the army, which she joined in 1970 when she was only 15 years old. Their son, BSB, 20, was a second-year chemistry student at Capital Normal University. BSB was a chubby boy with all the characteristics of a native Beijinger: warm, generous, wellinformed, and eloquent, but none of the “dandiacal pose” of children of senior cadres. He learned chemistry, but used the extracurricular time to take a part-time job in a company in Zhongguancun, which is full of IT talent, and so to support himself. He gave me a business card upon which was “Marketing manager for HTC VDC” before he told me, “I am a computer gamer. I have loved to play computer since I was young, and now this skill comes in handy” (BSB, 2004). However, his use was not limited to Zhongguancun, but was also available at home, even in the PLA 301 hospital. BSM told me that computers are now widely used in hospitals to register, diagnose, prescribe, administer medicine, arrange duties, and make appointments for treatment. There were at least one or two computers in her ward. These machines were really convenient and standard to use, but it was not uncommon for computer software or hardware to have problems because of too many users and improper use. Every time the problem could not be solved, the doctors and nurses in the ward would say, “Head nurse, please ask your computer expert to come.” At the beginning, BSB was very enthusiastic and on call. After each repair, his mother and her colleagues’ praise would be enough to motivate him to help next time. But after a period of time, he was unwilling to help, saying, “Mom, you always let me help in vain, which delays either my homework or my business. Don’t ask me for help again.” BSM thought, Who can I turn to if I don’t ask you for help? Not only does it cost nothing to ask you for help, but the most important thing is that you can come at the drop of a hat to provide the help we need. (BSM, 2004) BSB not only had good skills, but also understood her mom’s unprofessional description of the problems. So BSM began to think of all kinds of reasons and ways to get BSB to help her, and sometimes even treated him to KFC, McDonald’s, or Pizza Hut before asking him to go to the hospital to fix the computer. So much so that later, as long as BSM said, “Son, it’s mom’s treat today,” BSB would say, “What, your hospital computer broke down again?” Just now, BTG said that she is the “remote controller” of the family, and she has to “fiddle” with everything, which I think is too accurate a word. In our family, dad is also not good at the use of computers, but firstly

178 Artifact power not to be neglected because he is an “official”, and can send others instead of me to work for him, and secondly because he is reserved and doesn’t want me to think I am better than him. Technically, I’m just my mom’s “remote controller”. Actually, it’s not that I’m greedy, so as soon as my mother invited me to Pizza Hut, I helped her to fix the computer, but that I know if I don’t help her, no one else will. You see, she joined the army without graduating from junior high school at the age of 15 and has been working as a nurse. When she was growing up, there were no other books to read except reciting Chairman Mao’s “Three old essays”. It was really too difficult for her to learn a computer language at the age of nearly 50. But, I am different. I grew up in a completely open era. Although I also rely on traditional ways, such as going to the library or buying magazines to read, I am also used to reading what I need from the open information database of the whole society. Also I know how to communicate with classmates, colleagues and peers. I ask them how they do things I can’t do myself. If only someone has done it before, they are better than me and can point me in the right direction. So, I’m doing pretty well in this business, able to deal with some problems, so not only mother, but all the customers are very satisfied. In contrast, my mother is more influenced by me, because she is more dependent on me than my father. In fact, not only do I repair computers, but I can also help my mother a lot in other ways now. For example, when she came back from a business trip, she always asked me to pick her up at the railway station. Her luggage—two or three boxes, several large bags, and other odds and ends—was too much for her to carry. As soon as I arrived, I easily helped her get all her luggage off the train, and she would say, “Well, my son is of service now.” So, my mother listens to me now, because I can adapt to the society better than her. In short, I’m useful. In the past, if I said “you are wrong”, she would slap me or scold me. Once she becomes dependent on me, she naturally devolves power, giving me more opportunities for autonomy, and then the relationship between us changes accordingly. (BSB, 2004) After entering the 21st century, the elders’ disadvantage in electronic computers becomes more and more obvious with the change of two factors. One is the complexity of computer hardware and software. Home computers now have far more processing speed and hard disk capacity than they did 20 years ago, especially with all kinds of operating and editing software, which can be used to deal with text, translate between different languages, edit, typeset, make graphics or form, process digital or quantitative and qualitative data, show PowerPoint files, download text or pictures, make photo folders, watch movies and television, find maps or weather forecasts, as well as improve communication and exchange—for instance, send emails, participate in discussions on Bullet Board System (BBS) and Forum, chat with people using an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) system, exchange information with others by writing blogs, and broadcast your own radio or television program by sending audio or video files. The second factor is the

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popularization and expansion of electronic or computer networks. Since 1994, when the 64K special line connecting the “Education and scientific research demonstration network” in Zhongguancun, Beijing, was opened, China has invested a lot of money in the construction of Internet infrastructure. In the 13 years from 1997 to 2009, it invested 4.3 trillion CNY in this infrastructure and built a nationwide communication and optical cable network with a total length of 8.267 million kilometers, including 840,000 kilometers of long-distance optical cable lines. By June 2014, the number of Internet users in China had reached 632 million, and the Internet penetration rate reached 46.9%. Even China’s e-commerce retail sales reached 300 billion USD, becoming the largest online retail market in the world.10 So the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI), in “China’s digital transformation: The Internet’s impact on productivity and growth”, states: “A digital revolution is sweeping through China … The Internet is fundamentally reshaping the Chinese way of life” (MGI, 2014). The popularity of the Internet makes the gap between the older generation and the younger generation more obvious. Clearly, operating a computer and surfing the Internet is not easy for less-educated parents, because it requires operational ability, professional knowledge, and even a good foundation in English (although there is more and more Chinese material on the Internet, generally speaking, most information is presented in English), which is often beyond the reach of most parents. Therefore, it is indisputable that children, with the advantages of computer operation and language use, as well as their energy and wide interests, basically monopolize the “discourse power” of the Internet and its information. Anyone who sees these generational differences and has ever read Negroponte’s Digital Survival will recall such a similar argument in it: Some people worry about the social divide between the in formation-rich and the information-poor, the haves and the have-nots, the First and the Third Worlds. But the real cultural divide is going to be generational. When I meet an adult who tells me he has discovered CD-ROM, I can guess that he has a child between five and ten years old. When I meet someone who tells me she has discovered America Online, there is probably a teenager in her house. One is an electronic book, the other a socializing medium. Both are being taken for granted by children the same way adults don’t think about air (until it is missing) […] Whether it is the demographics of the Internet, the use of Nintendo and Sega, or even the penetration of home computers, the dominant forces are not social or racial or economic but generational. The haves and the have-nots are now the young and the old. Many intellectual movements are distinctly driven by national and ethnic forces, but the digital revolution is not. Its ethos and appeal are as universal as rock music. (Negroponte, 1995: 204) The digital divide between developed and developing countries, between the developing world’s middle class and the grassroots, is often talked about (see

180 Artifact power not to be neglected The Economist, 2005). It seems that the real digital divide, as Negroponte said, is between the younger and older generations. The only good thing, though, is that, unlike countries and classes, intergenerational differences in the use of Internet technology do not necessarily mean that older and younger generations are competing for access to information. Because of the continuity between generations, in most cases, blood or other social bonds often enable two or more generations of well-connected people to draw on each other’s strengths, understand each other, and help each other with their weaknesses. I mentioned in the previous chapter that Professor Deng Peng from North Carolina State University gave me a lot of support during my interview in Chongqing. He introduced me to his younger brother, CAF, a teacher at Qiujing Middle School, and COF, who was his good friend when they went to the countryside. After getting along for more than ten days, I knew that COF was helping Professor Deng Peng to edit their self-published memoirs of “old educated youth”—Dreaming of the Daba Mountain (Deng, 2009).11 In 1964, Deng Peng was only 15 years old. Due to his father’s history problems, he failed to enter high school despite his excellent academic performance. Influenced by the “model educated youth” Dong Jiageng, he bid farewell to Chongqing and joined more than 14,000 other intellectuals, who suffered the same fate due to family background and other problems, to settle in the Daba mountains in north-east Sichuan. In 1978, after 14 years of hardship, Deng Peng was admitted to the English teacher class of Sichuan Medical College, and later went abroad to receive his doctorate in American studies at Washington State University. For more than a decade, Deng and COF had been organizing the memoirs of the old educated youth. He believed that although the nationwide intellectual youth movement began in 1968, there were as many as 1.3 million old educated youth who went to the countryside before the Cultural Revolution, accounting for 7% of the total number (17.76 million) in Mao Zedong’s era (Liu, 2009: 537). This 7% of old educated youth was ignored even after the Cultural Revolution, which is the biggest injustice afforded to this silent group. In the memories of Deng Peng, COF, and dozens of other old educated youth, I read the tragedy of this silent group in that particular age. All of them became outcasts in the Revolution because of their parents’ problems, and this “group of outcasts in the revolution just accepted the remaining passion and ideal in the changing revolution” (Deng, 2009: 15). In this context, COF was encouraged by Deng Peng, an old classmate, to join the ranks of editors. In 1964, COF, like Deng Peng, came to Wanyuan county in the Daba mountains and settled down in the village. He didn’t leave there until 1978 when he entered the university. After graduation, COF was assigned to the publicity department of Chongqing Steel Works. Due to the poor efficiency of the factory, when I went to Chongqing for an interview, COF had been laid off for many years. But while others were fretting about being laid off, COF was taking it in his stride. With his unique enthusiasm and special affinity, he connected with hundreds of old educated youth in the nine counties of Da county, collecting a large number of text and picture information for

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Deng Peng’s Dreaming of the Daba Mountains. And most interesting of all, COF got help from his son COB. COB, who graduated from college, helped his father collect data and literature after work, and through the Internet he established a wide range of contacts with many other educated youth and their young children, who sent their parents’ memoirs and old photos via email and QQ, which not only accelerated the compilation of the “memoir”, but more importantly, also deepened the communication and understanding between old educated young people and their children: My son later told me that he had come to understand my generation by helping me to edit the book Dreaming of the Daba Mountains, and through the electronic network, he had also become good friends with many children of the “old educated youth”. They told each other, “We can really understand our parents now, especially why they put so much hope in our studies, which was because they were deprived of the right to read.” Indeed, from the time Deng Peng presided over the editing of the book, he proposed to “arouse the resonance of three generations (ourselves, our parents and our children), arouse the attention of the whole society and leave a precious legacy for the future generations” through the editing of the memoir. So our memoir was published with the inscription: “I would like to dedicate the following words written with painstaking efforts to our old educated and young partners, to the people of the Daba mountains who raised us, to our dear children …”, because we want their generation to understand our past. For this reason, Deng Peng took his daughter, who grew up in the United States, and I took my son, COB, to return to Wanyuan county, where we stayed when going to the countryside, to “search for roots”. (COF, 2004) Later, from their self-published Dreaming of the Daba Mountains, I read an article written by Deng’s daughter, Deng Yuanshu, describing the experience of “searching for roots”—“Father and the Daba Mountains”. The Harvard law school graduate wrote, “This trip helped me understand why my father has such complex feelings about his past and how his past shaped who he is today” (Deng, 2009: 373). Deng Peng and Deng Yuanshu, COF and COB, the story between the two generations is very apposite and the details are touching, but to be fair, years of interviews have taught me that not many young people really understand their parents and the age they lived in.12 Most of the young people who grow up in the prosperous years will still take their living environment and material conditions for granted—just as anthropologist Guo Yuhua said, there is also a gap between parents and children in terms of social experience and life perception. Professor Guo, like me, has found, more than once in interviews, that those “giants” who are great at manipulating electronic devices or computers, are often close to idiots or midgets when it comes to understanding the meaning of life. For example, she once said that when parents saw their children being extravagant, they would say sadly, “You should cherish your today’s happy life.

182 Artifact power not to be neglected When we were as young as you are now, we didn’t even have anything to eat. Even fat meat was delicious food for us.” Unexpectedly, their children came to the conclusion that “Dad, you were so happy at that time. You ate well and slept well, while we have nothing delicious to eat” (interview with Guo, 2005). Rather than simply dismissing their answers as heartless, I think their ignorance and ease with which they operate computers are in part a product of our consumerist era, when GDP is rising fast. In this way, only by understanding and dissecting the basic operational logic of the age of consumerism can you understand how the young generation, the discretionary teens and even the twenties, can be so dull in understanding the meaning of society or life. This requires us to go back to the present world, which is becoming faster and faster due to globalization and social transformation, and examine the huge and rapid social changes, all-inclusive peer groups, and the colorful media world faced by the growth of the young generation, so as to truly unravel the knot of the era that caused such huge differences between the two generations.

Notes 1 The growth of over-densification or involution in Chinese agriculture in the three decades after 1949 is a remarkable example of the double relationship. According to Huang Zongzhi, China’s rural areas were “forced by population pressure and government policies to put more and more labor into each unit of land area, forcing diminishing marginal returns” (Huang, 2000: 441). Specifically, between 1952 and 1979, the output of China’s agriculture tripled, while the input of labor increased by three to four times— mainly by mobilizing women to work, increasing the number of working days per year for farmers, and nearly doubling the rural population. This resulted in lower pay per working day, i.e., growth in rural production without development. 2 In 1978, at the time of reform and opening-up, the Engel coefficient of urban and rural residents in China was 57.5% and 67.6% respectively, while in 2008, the coefficient was reduced to 37.9% and 43.7% respectively (Ru, Lu & Li, 2009: 20). Both urban and rural areas have seen a drop of about 20% in the past 30 years. 3 The first McDonald’s opened in Shenzhen in 1990, arriving in China three years after KFC and in Beijing five years after KFC. 4 McDonald’s opened in Japan in 1971, in Hong Kong in 1975, in Singapore in 1979, in Malaysia in 1982, in Taiwan in 1984, in Thailand in 1985, in Mexico in 1985, in Turkey in 1986, in South Korea in 1988, in Shengzhen, China and Russia in 1990, in Indonesia in 1991, in Beijing in 1992, etc. We can almost say that the opening schedule of McDonald’s is the schedule of industrialization or urbanization of a country or region. 5 In fact, even the old pressure popcorn machine was a product of the Industrial Revolution. In the late 19th century, an American named John Rueckheim discovered that when corn was heated in an airtight container and opened hot, it would burst like a flower as the pressure in the container dropped. Later, Rueckheim’s brother heated the sugar with the corn, resulting in popcorn that was crystal clear, beautiful, and delicious. Tens of thousands of people queued to eat popcorn every day during the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and it has been popular around the world ever since. 6 In the Mao Zedong era, this gadget, with a coffee-colored plastic shell on the side and a cloth trimmed with gold silk on the front, together with a phoenix or permanent bicycle, were probably all that signified the state of life and social status of an average family.

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7 The robot competition requires students to comprehensively apply the knowledge of mechanical drawing, digital electrography, single-chip microcomputing, sensing technology, automatic control, image processing, computer programming languages, motor driving, and other disciplines learned in undergraduate study. Common robotics competitions include the VEX Robotics Engineering Challenge, VEXIQ Robotics Challenge, BDS Robotics Engineering Challenge, and the Humanoid Robot Competition. 8 I would like to thank the Samsung group of South Korea for twice commissioning me to do research on mobile phones in 2006 and 2008, especially the research on the lifestyle and mobile phone use of middle and low income groups in China in 2008, which enabled me and the research group I led to obtain the above revolutionary insights. Later, Professor Zhu Hong, a member of the research group, and my student Dr. Fan Peipei, explained this revolutionary view in different ways in their papers (Fan, 2010; Zhu, 2011). 9 To be frank, when the Chinese translation of The Third Wave was published in 1984, the telephone penetration rate in the United States alone had reached 83.7%, while that in China was less than 1%. Therefore, although Toffler’s prediction was exciting, the reality in China was that people were skeptical (Yang, 1984). Few could imagine that 30 years later China would have made such significant progress in its telecoms industry. 10 Guo Yuhua recalled that the initial charge for Internet access in Beijing was 100 CNY per hour in 1994 (interview with Guo, 2005). At that time, public facilities, computer equipment, personal technology, and financial ability were all obstacles to Internet access. But over the next two decades, as China’s public Internet infrastructure boomed, the cost of access fell again and again. Now I stay connected every day, along with my home phone (including long-distance calls at certain times), at a fixed monthly rate of 205 CNY. When you consider my 2007 visit to the University of Leeds, where I was charged £10 a day for Internet access at the IBIS hotel, you can’t help but admit that social progress in China often makes the developed world look less “developed” in some ways. 11 Four years later, this two-volume memoir was officially published by Chongqing Publishing House, entitled Silent Community—Memoirs of Old Intellectuals Who Went to the Countryside Before the Cultural Revolution (Deng, 2009). 12 I think even Deng Peng and COF could not be sure that children would really understand their past without the special event of editing Dreaming of the Daba Mountains, let alone me. That’s why I think Deng Peng and COF cherish the intergenerational understanding and communication, the by-product of Dreaming of the Daba Mountains.

References

Ai, Qing, “On the Crest of a Wave”, in Qing, Ai (ed.), Ai Qing Poems, Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House, 370, 1979. Ali, Watkins, 1968, Marching in the Streets, trans. by Fan Changlong, Jinan: Shandong Pictorial Publishing House, 2003. Atiyah, Claudine, Intergenerational Sociology, trans. by Guan Zhenhu, Beijing: Hualing Press, 1993. Ayres, Chris, “Simon Cowell Quits as American Idol Judge”, The Times, January 12, 2010. Ba, Jin, Record of Random Thoughts, Beijing: Writers Publishing House, 2005. Ba, Jin, Family, Beijing: Beijing People’s Literature Publishing House, 2006. Bai, Xin, Yang Jian, & Mou Huansen, “Mobile Phone Technology Development and Social and Cultural Constraints: A Survey and Analysis of Mobile Phone Use and Social Culture in China and Japan”, Future and Development, Vol. 3, 52–56, 2008. Bao, Boyi, The Spring Moon, trans. by Lin Bin et al, Hefei: Anhui Literature and Art Publishing House, 1986. Baudrillard, Jean, Selected Writings, edited and introduced by Mark Poster, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. Beijing Hantang Culture Development Co. LTD, Decade (1986—1996): A Chronicle of Chinese Pop Music, Beijing: China Film Press, 1997. Bell, Daniel, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Twentieth Anniversary Edition, New York: Basic Books, 1996. Bell, Daniel, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, New York: Basic Books, 1999. Bellab, Robert et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1985. Berg, Bruce L., Qualitative Research Methods for the Social Sciences (4th ed.), Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 2001. Berger, Peter L. & Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1966. Bernstein, Thomas P., Going to the Mountains and Countryside, trans. by Li Feng et al., Beijing: Police Officer Education Press, 1993. Bo, Yibo, A Review of Several Major Decisions and Events (revised ed.), Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1997.

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Index

100-day-reform movement 48 1911 revolution 11, 48, 50 1949 revolution 54, 55–56, 57, 64, 65, 78, 104, 147 academia 86 age 40–41 agriculture 9, 39, 53, 54, 55, 63, 66, 160, 182n1 American Idol 120–121 Analects of Confucius 42, 43, 46, 69n2, 154 animation art 165–166 anti-right movement 55, 62, 78 anti-spiritual pollution movement 85 anti-war demonstrations 13–14 Apple Computer Inc 174 April Fifth Movement 75, 78, 99, 110, 111n5 Atiyah, C. 7, 10 Ba, Jin 11, 52, 78, 146 Baby, Baby 137 Bai, Hua 73, 75, 112n10 Baihu Tongyi 43 Baird, John Logie 161 Bao, Boyi 11 Baudrillard, Jean 153 beat generation 12 Bei, Dao 79–80, 82, 92, 104, 110, 111nn8&9, 113n16 Beijing Youth League Committee 63 Bell, Alexander Graham 161 Bell, Daniel 175 Berg, B.L. 29, 30, 34 Berger, P.L. and Luckmann, T. 2 Bian, Zhongyun 59, 60, 61 Bismarck, Otto von 10 Bitter Love 73, 112n10

Black Beauty 58 blind texting 170–171 blood theory 60–61 Bo, Xicheng 94 Bogardus, Emory S. 31 Book of Rites 40, 42, 69n2, 136, 154 Bourdieu, P. 129, 130 Bourdieu, P. and Wacquant, L.D. 34–35 bourgeois liberalization 89–90 Braudel, Fernand 153, 154, 160 Bu, Dahua 58 Bu, Wei 4 buttons 164 buzzwords 144–145, 151n6 Cai, Yuanpei 107 Cambodia 12, 14 cannibalism 11, 49–50 Cao, Xianbin 88 capitalism 8–9, 16; student rebellion against 13, 14–15 cars 162, 164, 167 cell phones see mobile phones centralization 54–55 Chang, Guangzhi 159 Chauvel, L. 106 Chen, Danqing 82 Chen, Duxiu 11, 48, 49, 56, 70n4, 75, 104, 107, 110, 146 Chen, Guang 72, 75 Chen, Tianhua 51 Chen, Xiaolu 59, 62, 71n12 Chen, Xiaoxu 94 Chen, Yi 59–60, 71n12 Chen, Zhishang and Jin, Kexi 84 Cheng, Boqing 10 Cherrington, Ruth 87, 88, 128, 129 Chi, Zhiqiang 74

200 Index Children in the Great Depression 69 China Youth magazine 81, 82, 84, 112nn12 &13&15 Chinese Enlightenment thinkers 48, 49 class struggle 55, 61; educated youth in countryside 66, 89 Classic of Filial Piety, The 42 clothes 91, 141–142 cofigurative culture 20 Cohen, R. and Kennedy, P. 8 College Students magazine 90 communication/interaction 106–107 Communist Party of China 53, 54, 55, 63, 65, 67, 69, 70n7, 75, 77, 84, 85, 92, 104–105 Communist Youth League 57, 63, 123 computers 4, 162; complexity of hardware/ software 178; Waterloo of parents 174–182 Comte, Augustus 7, 8, 18 Condorcet, Marquis de 22 Confucianism 11, 38–43, 46, 48–49; demise of 54; Mao’s education 56 Confucius 41, 42–43, 46, 48–49 consanguinity 38–45 consumerism 131–132, 182; food culture 155–161 consumption behavior 156–158 contradiction and conflict 9, 12, 45, 52, 105 controversy 72–77 Copy of Tiananmen Poems 78 countryside, intellectuals sent to 62–69, 71n13, 180–182, 183n11 Cowell, Simon 120, 121 Cui, Jian 86, 91, 113nn16&20, 130, 140 cultural reverse 1–7, 46–47; definition 3; research and debate about 28–35, 37n8 Cultural Revolution 12, 29, 54, 55, 57, 74, 81, 104, 151n8; clothing 141, 142; educational revolution 66, 68; generation unit 19; historical tragedy 78–79; Mao Zedong fever 90; May 16 Notice 58, 70n7; positive shaping 69; Red Guards 58–64; sex 147, 151n7; writers persecuted 80; young intellectuals 71n13; younger generation survivors 2, 6, 7 Cultural Revolution Newspaper of Beijing Middle School 61 cultural transmission 20 culture: Chinese and Western 107; food and 153–161; popular/vulgar 132, 135; youth/pop 142–143

Culture and Commitment 3, 20 customs 44, 52 cyber language 145–146; SMS messages 172 Davis-Friedmann, D. 23–24, 57 de Beauvoir, Simone 142 Deng, Lijun 86, 91 Deng, Peng 139, 180–181, 183n12 Deng, Xiaoping 1, 3, 6, 61, 65, 75, 77, 85, 91, 92–93, 107, 111n5, 115, 137, 151n9; southern tour 93, 110n1, 169 Deng Xiaoping’s Generation: Young Chinese Intellectuals of the 1980s 128 Deng, Yuanshu 181 Dichtung und Wahrheit 9 digital divide 179–180 Digital Survival 179 dignity of teachers 45, 46–47, 59 Dilthey, Wilhelm 18 Disappearance of the Traditional Society 99 disco 3, 86, 142 discourse 76–77; hegemony 89; younger generation 143–144 Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste 130 Dong, Chaocai 75 Dong, Jiageng 64, 180 Dong, Zhongshu 43 “Down with Confucius” 48, 49 Dreaming of the Daba Mountain 180–181 driving 164, 167 Dryden, G. and Voss, J. 5 dual value system 100 Durkheim, Emile 9, 36n3, 136 education: daughter as teacher 137–139; educator/educatee relationship 28; ‘Embattled’ 117–118; globalization and 26; Guangya School 124–125; higher education expansion 24; Mao Zedong and 56–58; post-80s generation 121; sex 147–149; student rebellion 12–16; teachers’ dignity 45, 46, 59; young intellectuals 62–67; youth education 87–89 Education Revolution 5 eight-part essay 47 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 13 Elder, G. H. 7, 69 elder brother 45

Index electronic media 121, 150, 161–167, 173 embeddedness, mobile phones and 172 Engels, F. 19, 25, 36n6, 47, 98 entertainment programs, tv 120–121 “entrepreneurs” and “gold diggers” 87 etiquette and custom 44 examination of professors 67 examination system, imperial 47, 48, 51, 66 Exhibition of 12 artists 80 Fan, Jingyi 28 farming society 39, 44 fashion 86, 91, 141–142 fashion magazines 132 fathers, worship by sons 137; see also filial piety Feeding China’s Little Emperors 160 Fei, Xiaotong 11–12, 21, 25, 28, 39, 41, 44, 45, 52, 116, 117, 119 Feng, Jicai 63 Feng, Xiaogang 168 Fertility System 52 feudal society 20, 40, 41, 53 filial piety 41–46, 49, 50 Fiske, J. 142 five constants 43, 49 focus group interviews 28–35, 37n11 food 4–5, 153–161, 170 Food in Chinese Culture: An Anthropological and Historical Perspective 159 formalism 115–116, 150n1 Foucault, M. 74, 76, 143 Founding Ceremony 74 Four Books, The 42 four books and five classics 47, 69n2 four clean-ups movement 55, 61 four olds 59 France 10, 12, 14, 15 Frankfurt School 135, 141 French Revolution 5, 10, 14 Freud, S. 137 Fu, Lei 59 Fuller, Simon 120 Furrand Economic Advisors 94 Fussell, Paul 129–130, 135 garment business 97 Gates, Bill 137, 174 gender, practical skills and 164–165 generation: actuality 18–19; beat 12; problem 9–11; social fact 7, 36n3; status 18–19; succession 7; unit 19; see also

201

intergenerational relations; post-80s generation Germany 10, 14, 17, 19, 135 Geser, Hans 173 Giddens, A. 8, 10, 16, 25, 26 globalization 1, 2, 6, 25–28, 36n7, 107, 115; effect on intergenerational relations 16–17; entertainment programs 120–121; McDonald’s 153–161; origin of 8; three views 8–9 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 9 golden age/technology 12 Gong, Xiaobing 117, 150n2 Gorer, Geoffery 11 Granovetter, Mark 172 Great Depression 7, 69 Great Leap Forward 54, 55, 57, 63, 64, 71n15 Great Transformation, The 172 “Group Effect” 32 Gu, Cheng 80 Guangya School 124–125 Guo, Moruo 52 Guo, Yuhua 4–5, 34, 158, 170, 171, 181, 183n10 Han, Han 73, 117, 126, 136, 150n2 Han, Yu 46 Han dynasty 41, 42, 43 Harrison, Lawrence 106 Harvard University 4, 22, 106, 123, 125, 131, 165 Hayden, Tom 14 He, Jiacheng 73, 110n3 He, Long 78 He, Sanwei 72 He, Xin 72, 73 He, Yunlu 73 He, Zhili 72, 74 Held, D. 9 heterogeneity of the transitional society 114–115 Hobsbawm, Eric 15 Hong Kong and Taiwan singers/songs 91, 130, 141 Hou, Jun 64 household registration system 54–55, 169 “How should we be fathers now?” (Lu Xun) 50 Hsu, Francis L. K. 100, 101 Hu, Fuming 73, 77, 110 Hu, Hanmin 70n4, 110 Hu, Sheng 73

202 Index Hu, Shi 48, 49, 56, 146 Hu, Yaobang 75, 77, 78, 110n2 Huang, Wanqiu 94 Huang, Xing 110 Huangfu, Ping 73, 110n1 Hundred Days Reform 48–49, 51 Huntington, S. 22, 26 I Have Such a Mother 57 ideological liberation movement 73, 77–78 idolatry 136–137 idols 135–141; children as 137; super girls 122–123, 136 Ikeda, Daisaku 116, 117 individual interests 83, 105, 113n24 individualism: American society 83; post-80s and post-90s generation 122 industrialization and urbanization 8, 9, 54, 155–156, 182n4; generation problem and 10 Inglehart, R. 5, 27 Inkeles, Alex 106 intergenerational relations 38–71; computers 174–182; conflict 87–89, 117–119; discourse and 76–77, 143; education and 117–118; globalized perspective 7–17; Mannheim and 17–20; McDonald’s 154–159; mobile phones 168–173; in social sciences 17–18; social transformation theory 21–25 Internet 4, 16, 117, 144, 162, 168, 171, 174, 175, 178–180, 179, 183n10; network language 145–146, 151n6, 172 IQ level and diligence 47 Jaeger, Hans 7, 9, 10, 17, 18 Japan: animation art 165–166; Sino-Japanese war 48, 104, 107; war of resistance 53–54, 65, 140 Jay, Chou 117–118, 150n3 Jet, Li 74 Jin, Xunhua 64 Jobs, Steve 174 Kang, Youwei 48, 49, 104, 107 karaoke 91, 113n21 Ke, Yunlu 72 Keep Your Powder Dry 21 KFC 16, 91, 94, 154–159 King, Ambrose 100, 103, 114, 115, 116, 150n1

King Cheng of Zhou 42 Kitzinger, J. 33 Knodel, John 32 Korean War 55 land reform 54, 64 Langzhong county 52–53 Lao, Gui 57, 70n8 Lao, She 59 Lao, Zi 154 laosanjie (old three-grade students) 63, 123 Lazarsfeld, Paul 31, 37n10, 141 Lei, Feng 81, 104 Lerner, D. 99–100 Levenson, Joseph R. 48 Levinson, Paul 168, 173 Li, Da 59 Li, Dazhao 48, 49, 104, 146 Li, Dongmin 78 Li, Guyi 86 Li, Hongzhang 48, 107 Li, Keqiang 69 Li, Nanyang 57, 70n8 Li, Rui 70n8, 93 Li, Yanjie 87, 88 Li, Yaomei and Li, Yaolin 52 Li, Yinhe 72, 74, 111n4 Li, Yining 93 Li, Youwei 75 Li, Yuchun 120, 122, 126, 136 Liang, Dingfen 125 Liang, Qichao 51, 75, 99, 104, 105, 107 Liji: Xueji 46 Lin, Juemin 51 Lin, Xu 51 Lin, Yusheng 49 Lin, Yutang 39, 51, 99, 101, 160 Lindner, W. 12 Ling, Zhijun 90 Liu, Shaoqi 61, 63, 65, 78 Liu, Shipei 110 Liu, Xiaofeng 114 Liu, Xiaoqing 94 Liu, Xinwu 80 Liu, Zhenyun 168 Lorenz, Ottokar 10, 18 Lu, Haodong 51 Lu, Jie 52–53 Lu, Wenfu 94 Lu, Xinhua 80, 110 Lu, Xun 38, 48, 49, 50, 104, 107, 114–115, 131, 146, 154

Index Lu, Yulin 143–144 Luo, Xiaohai 58, 71n10 Ma, Hong 73, 75 Ma, Xulun 56 Management Revolution 5 Manchu dynasty 48 Mannheim, Karl 7–8, 17, 18, 19, 21, 28, 106 Mao, Shanyu 94 Mao, Zedong 5, 12–13, 54, 80, 97, 105, 107, 140; class struggle 55–56, 61; on education 24, 56, 57–60; fever 90; poems 90; young intellectuals 62–67 marginal man/people 11, 22, 24–25, 93–103; compared to transitional people 101; mental state of 101; two types 99 market economy 1, 22–24, 73–74, 86–87, 88, 92, 93, 97, 104, 110n1, 156; pop culture and 130 market transformation theory 22–23 marriage 51–52, 54, 70n6, 146–147, 151n9 Marx, K. 19, 25, 36n6, 47, 98 May 7 Directive 58 May Fourth cultural movement 11, 12, 48, 49, 50, 56, 59, 99, 107, 119 May 16 Notice 58, 70n7 May 7th cadre schools 89 Mazzini, Guiseppe 10 McDonald’s 16, 91, 94, 154–159, 177, 182nn3&4; symbol of American culture 155 McKeever, William 173 McLuhan, E. 162 McLuhan, M. 16, 25 Mead, Margaret 3, 6, 15, 20, 21, 40, 114 Mencius 42, 43, 46 Mencius: King Hui of Liang 46 mental pollution 84, 141 Merton, Robert 31–32, 37n10 Mian, Mian 74 Microsoft 174 migration 10–11, 97, 98; see also marginal man/people Mills, Charles Wright 2, 14, 16, 17 Ming dynasty 43, 97 Mironov, S.M. 44 Mittelmann, James H. 9, 25 mobile phones 168–173; entertainment functions 169; SMS function 171, 172, 173 modernity 8–11, 13, 14, 98–103, 114–116; global 26, 36n4

203

Mongolians 126–128 Morse, Samuel 161 Mother Yang Mo 57 Mu, Zimei 72, 74 multiculturalism 101, 130 music 133–135; see also Super Voice Girl “My country and my people” (Lin Yutang) 51 Nankai Middle School 140, 176 nation-states 9–10, 16 Nee, Victor 22 Negroponte, Nicholas 4, 179–180 new citizen theory 104 new communists 66 New Star 73 New Youth magazine 11, 48, 50, 104 Nietzsche, Friedrich 11, 45, 119 novels 95, 147 obscure poetry 79, 80 Oedipus complex 137 old educated youth 180–181 one-child policy 58, 121, 156, 160 One Hundred Thousand Bad Jokes 143, 151n5 Opium War 47 overlap 114, 116 Pan, Guangdan 51–52, 70n6 Pan, Xiao 82–85, 112nn13&15 Pan-American Dream, The 106 parent-child relationship 1–7, 11–12; blood theory 60–61; child idols 137; filial piety 41–46 Park, R.E. 10–11, 98 Parsons, Talcott 22, 36n6 path dependence theories 64 patriarchal clan system 40, 41 patriarchy 40, 42; see also filial piety Peking University 24, 58, 90, 107, 108, 123, 124, 125, 126, 140 Peng, Dehuai 78 Peng, Jialing 51 Peng, Qingyi 87 Peng, Zhen 78 people’s commune system, collapse of 85 Perry, Elizabeth 4, 22, 123 poetry: obscure 79, 80, 111n9; Qing dynasty 109; Tiananmen poems 78, 110, 111n5; Wang Guozhen 92 Polanyi, Karl 172 Pop Idol 120, 121

204 Index Port Huron Statement 14, 15 positivism 18 post-80s generation 2, 121, 122–125, 126, 130, 150n2, 157, 164 postfigurative culture 3, 6, 15, 20–21 Postman, Neil 161, 173 power relations 76, 77, 143 prefigurative culture 15, 20–21 price dual-track system 73–74, 110n3 printing 161 Qi, Benyu 61 Qian, Xuantong 48 Qin dynasty 41 Qing dynasty 52, 70n4, 109, 124–125, 146 Qiu, Jin 51 Qiu, Xinglong 72, 75 Qu, Xiao 87–88, 89, 113n18 qualitative/quantitative research, debate about 29–30 Quattrocchi, A. and Nairn, T. 12, 14, 15 rebellion: as hypercorrection 54–62; jeans as symbol of 142; through education 58; youth 12–13, 14 recommendation system 67 Red Guards 58–64 Red Star over China 51 reflection 106–110 “Reflections on ownership” (Li Youwei) 75 reform movement of 1898 see Hundred Days Reform Reich, Charles A. 5 reversed socialization 1, 6, 7, 20, 36n1, 37n8, 161 revolution 5; see also Cultural Revolution Revolution of Learning 5 Revolution of Parents 5 Revolution of Students 5 rice 153–154 Riggs, F. W. 114, 116 rites and customs 44 Ritzer, George 155 Robertson, R. 9 Robinson, J. 156 Rogers, Everett M. 33, 37n10, 141, 172 role models 20, 40, 51, 64; children as 138 romanticism–historicism 18 Rong, Zhongkui 46 Rouvroy, Claude-Henri de 22 Rural China 39

Scalapino, Robert A. 56 scar literature 79, 80, 112n10 secularization 91, 92, 104, 130 self-employed 87, 89, 90, 97 seniority 45 sex 74, 111n4, 147–149, 152n10 Shang dynasty 40 Shanshan Suit 144 Shekou incident 87–89 Shi, Jianru 51 Shi, Xianmin 90 Shirokogorov, Sergei Mikhailovich 45 Shishuo 46 Shu, Ting 80, 92, 147 Simmel, Georg 7, 8, 11, 18, 98, 106 Sino-Japanese war 48, 104, 107 Sister Lotus 74, 136 Snow, Edgar 51, 56 social class, style and taste 129–130 Social Construction of Reality, The 2 social transformation theory 21–25 socialist commodity economy 85 Song, Binbin 58, 60, 71n12 Song, Longxiang 73, 110n2 Song dynasty 43, 161 Soviet Union 22, 23, 54; educational system 57 special economic zones 85, 87 Spencer, H. 83 Spitzer, Alan 7, 18 Spring Moon 11 Stewart, D.W. and Shamdasani, P.N. 30, 31, 32, 33, 34 stock market 93–94 Stoetzel, Jean 75 student rebellion 12–13 Students for Democracy Society (SDS) 13, 14, 15 Sui dynasty 47 Sun, Benwen 53 Sun, Changjiang 93 Sun, Liping 23, 115 Sun, Yat-sen 109 Sun Zhigang incident 75 Super Voice Girl 120–121, 122, 136 synchronic marginal person 100 Szelenyi, Ivan 156 Taiwan 114–115 Tan, Sitong 51 Tan, Yonglin 91 Tao, Zhu 61, 78 taste and style 129–135

Index teacher’s dignity 45, 46, 59 teachers,unfamiliarity with popular songs 118–119 telegraph 161 telephones, in Chinese homes 169–170, 175, 183n9 television: food culture and 159; grandparents and 163; invention of 161; Super Voice Girl 120–121, 122, 136 The China Times 51–52 “The diary of a madman” 49 The Empirical Philosophy 7 three cardinal principles 43, 49 Thunderstorm, The 11 Tian, Jiyun 93 Tiananmen Square protests (1989) 73, 89, 92 Tocqueville, Alexis de 15, 83 Today (magazine) 80 Toffler, Alvin 175, 183n9 Tong, Ange 91 Tong, Dalin 93 Touraine, Alain 14 tradition and modernity 116 traditional culture, basis of 39 “traditional–modern” continuum 100 traffic rules 115 transitional people 99–100; compared to marginal people 101 Triple Door 73 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques 22 ‘twenty-four filial piety’ 43–44; see also filial piety Twilight of the Idol 137 “two whatevers” doctrine 73, 77 United States: American Idol 120–121; exchange student 107–108; generation problem 10–11; jeans and 142; Port Huron Statement 14, 15; youth revolt and 13; see also KFC; McDonald’s university enrollment 6–7 value dilemmas, transitional people 100 values 103–110; pluralistic 116; socialist core value system 105 Van Maanen, J.J. 30 Vietnam War 12, 13, 15 violence 60 Walder, Andrew 54 Wan, Li 75, 85 Wang, Chingwei 70n4, 110

205

Wang, Guozhen 92 Wang, Hairong 56, 58 Wang, Meng 93 Wang, Ming 58, 71n12 Wang, Xiaobo 74, 111n4 Wang, Xiaoni 73 War of Resistance (1937- 1945) 53, 65 Watson, James 154, 155, 156, 160 Webster, Andrew 72 Wei, Yuan 107 Wei, Zhuolin 117–118 WeiHhui 74 Wenzhou farmers 97–98, 113n23 Western material civilization 107 Western student movement (1968) 15, 36n5, 62 Western Zhou dynasty 42 Westernization movement 47–48 “what should be” and “what is” 115–116, 150n1 world system theory 22, 36n6 worship 135–137 Wozniak, Steve 174 Wu, Jinglian 73, 75, 93 Wu, Xiaoying 117, 118 Wu, Yue 51, 70n4 Xi, Jinping 69 Xia dynasty 40 Xie, Fei 92 Xin, Ming 90 Xing, Yan 64 Xingzhong Hui (The Revive China Society) 109 Xiong, Chengji 51 Xu, Jingya 73, 112n9 Xu, Langguang 101 Xu, Xilin 110 Xue, Muqiao 73, 75 Xunzi 46 Xunzi: Lilun 46 Xunzi: Ruxiao 46 Yale University 13 Yan, Mengwei 9 Yan, Yunxiang 91, 156–157 Yang, Dusheng 110 Yang, Guoshu 42 Ye, Qianwen 91 “young China”/“new youth” 75, 99, 109 young intellectuals, sent to countryside 62–67, 71n13 youth educators 87–89

206 Index youth insurrection see student rebellion youth subculture: American 12; mobile technology 172–173 Yu, Guangyuan 93 Yu, Luoke 61, 78 Yu, Yue 146 Yuan, Geng 75, 88, 113n17 Yuan, Shikai 48 Yue, Xiaodong 136, 137 Zeng, Guofan 48, 107 Zhang, Chengzhi 58 Zhang, Guangzhi 153 Zhang, Liangying 120, 136 Zhang, Mingjun 75 Zhang, Tiesheng 67 Zhang, Weiying 74, 111n3 Zhang, Xianliang 94 Zhang, Xincan 65–66 Zhang, Xueyou 91

Zhang, Yongjie and Cheng, Yuanzhong 7 Zhang, Zhidong 48, 124 Zhang, Zhixin 78 Zhao, Chuan 91 Zhao, Ziyang 85, 110n2 Zhejiang village 97–98 Zheng, Taisong 169 Zheng, Zhongbing 90 Zhou, Bichang 120, 136 Zhou, Bingjian 64 Zhou, Guoping 137–138 Zhou, Xueguang and Hou, Liren 62, 68, 69 Zhou, Zuoren 48 Zhou dynasty 40, 42 Zhu, Dake 92 Zhu, Fenbo 86 Zhu, Hong 169, 172, 183n8 Zhu, Pengbo 94 Zou, Rong 51, 110 Zuo, Zongtang 107

Cultural Reverse II

The book proposes a new academic concept, “Cultural Reverse” (文化反哺), referring to the phenomenon beginning in China in the 1980s in which the older generation started to learn from the younger generation, and analyzes the multiple causes and social impacts of this trend. Following on from the first volume, this second volume further analyzes the multiple causes of cultural reverse, including rapid social change, the influence of peer groups, and the impact of the media. Then, in a broader context, the author discusses the complex interdependence of and conflict among the State, society, and youth. He tells a story of the transformation of Chinese youth over the past hundred years, and names this “one-place” (fast-changing China) and “one-time only” (unrepeatable) phenomenon the “China feeling”. The innovative content of the book pushes the barriers of the academic field. Scholars of Chinese sociology and general readers interested in contemporary Chinese society will find this book to be essential. Zhou Xiaohong served as dean of the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Nanjing University for 16 years; now he is a senior professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at Nanjing University. His main research fields are sociological theory, social psychology, and contemporary China studies.

China Perspectives

The China Perspectives series focuses on translating and publishing works by leading Chinese scholars, writing about both global topics and China-related themes. It covers Humanities & Social Sciences, Education, Media and Psychology, as well as many interdisciplinary themes. This is the first time any of these books have been published in English for international readers. The series aims to put forward a Chinese perspective, give insights into cutting-edge academic thinking in China, and inspire researchers globally. Titles in sociology currently include: The Way to a Great Country A Macroscopic View on Chinese Population in the 21st Century Tian Xueyuan Social Structure and Social Stratification in Contemporary China Lu Xueyi Social Construction and Social Development in Contemporary China Lu Xueyi Economic Transition and People’s Livelihood: China Income Distribution Research Zhao Renwei Economic Transition and People’s Livelihood: China Economic Transition Research Zhao Renwei Academic Experiences of International Students in Chinese Higher Education Mei Tian, Fred Dervin and Genshu Lu For more information, please visit www.routledge.com/series/CPH

Cultural Reverse II The Multidimensional Motivation and Social Impact of Intergenerational Revolution Zhou Xiaohong

This book is published with financial support from the Chinese Fund for the Humanities and Social Sciences First published in English 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Zhou Xiaohong Translated by Tong Yali The right of Zhou Xiaohong to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. English Version by permission of The Commercial Press. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-90415-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-02430-9 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK

DOI: 10.4324/9781003024309

Contents

List of illustrations

vi

1

Social transition as the impetus to refurbish history

1

2

The peer group as knowledge reservoir and extended memory

39

3

The media: more about survival than information

71

4

What has been ushered in by cultural reverse?

105

5

Conclusion: state, society, and intergenerational relations

137

References Index

177 187

Illustrations

Figures 3.1 Development of global information communication technologies

76

Tables 3.1 Global media development timeline 5.1 External strikes and educational reform

73 139

1

Social transition as the impetus to refurbish history

China is crossing the river as fast as it can. And sometimes the process is more like the spawning run of salmons—hopefully jumping up rapids rather than taking carefully chosen steps. Salmons can cover a distance of 300 miles in about three weeks; China is packing the changes of decades into a few years. And what is true for China on a huge scale is true within the small scale of families; within one generation, prospects in life have changed dramatically. Parents have to adjust to new values and desires of their children at high speed. And Chinese children have to walk a tightrope between respecting their parents and neglecting their parents’ wishes. John Naisbitt

How is history refurbished? “Man cannot step twice into the same river” is a famous saying of the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus. He wanted to tell us that nature is changing all the time. In fact, the same is true of human society. Today, when the changes triggered by globalization and social transformation are increasingly the most remarkable facts of our time, we can even say that one cannot step into the same river Once. Because “stepping in” is a process, and between the beginning and the end of this process, the changing society we live in may have changed beyond recognition. Human society has been changing since ancient times, but transformation becoming a social fact concerned with human beings or a theme of human selfconscious thinking is, like sociology itself, the product of modernity (Giddens, 1982: 1). Anyone familiar with the history of social science in the West knows that the main achievements and fundamental rules in it basically come from the so-called great transition from tradition to modernity from the 18th century to the 20th century. To put it simply, the path of change and analysis of its motivation is the entire intellectual heritage of Western or modern social sciences. It is in this sense that we also propose that we should strive to understand in academia the great social changes that have taken place in China over the years from 1978 to 2020 of reform and opening-up to the outside world; otherwise, as Huang Wansheng said, “both China and the West will suffer a great loss” DOI: 10.4324/9781003024309-1

2

Social transition

(Huang & Liu, 2009; Zhou, 2010). In fact, the study of cultural reverse, through the changes in the intergenerational relationship, to see the great changes in Chinese society, is one of these systematic efforts. Although human society is always in the process of change, there are only two great changes with real qualitative significance. The first is the transformation from primitive society to civilized society, namely the emergence of civilization itself (Huntington, 2010: 47) around 5,000 BC. Another is the so-called “modernization” that has been spreading all over the world since the beginning of the 18th century. As a transition from traditional to modern or agricultural society to industrial and post-industrial society, modernization is the most drastic, far-reaching, and apparently inevitable social change in human history (Rozman, 2003: 5), which includes industrialization, urbanization, and literacy, education, affluence, increased social mobilization, and more complex and diverse occupational structures (Huntington, 2010: 47). If, in 5,000 BC, neither the human mind nor the complexity of society allowed our ancestors to analyze and discuss the meaning of the emergence of civilization, then, as a child of modernity or change, social science, especially sociology, which has grown since the 18th century, has begun to consciously think about human social change in the face of increasingly frequent and complex social changes, relying on various empirical means obtained by the development of modern natural science. As early as the 18th century, the pioneers of what would become known as sociology, Battista Vico in Italy, Adam Ferguson in England, and Comte de Saint-Simon in France, were the first to contemplate the difference between past and present history, and to attempt a syllogistic division of human history.1 One sign of the most successful of these attempts was the concept of an “industrial society” by Saint-Simon, who found the most appropriate connotation for the “modern” of modern society. Under their influence, the Frenchman Auguste Comte, the father of sociology, and the British Herbert Spencer, the second father of sociology, began to establish change as one of the basic contents of this new discipline. For this reason, Comte established the social dynamics with human social change as the theme, and, like the founders of sociology including Saint-Simon, used syllogism to express the process of social change as the theological, metaphysical, and positive stages. Spencer, on the other hand, takes it a step further by focusing on the changes that have occurred since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and thus naturally divides the history of human change into the history of the transition from a martial society to an industrial one. In Spencer’s case, the essence of a martial society is its coercion, “while with the industrial type of society, organized on the principle of voluntary cooperation, there harmonizes that monogamic union which voluntary domestic co-operation presupposes” (Spencer, 1925: 569). Since the transformation of European society from traditional agricultural society to modern industrial society directly gave birth to social science, it is quite natural, then, that discussions of tradition and modernity based originally on the unilinear evolution theory become what Weber calls the ideal type (Weber, 1949: 90), or Parsons’s model variable (Parsons & Shils, 1951: 77).

Social transition

3

Thus, the literature of the social sciences is full of variations of the binary traditional–modern pair, including Mann’s identity–contract society, Spencer’s warrior society–industrial society, Marx’s feudalist society–capitalist society, Tonnies’s community–society, Tocqueville’s aristocracy–democracy, Durkheim’s mechanical solidarity–organic unity, Weber’s patriarchal traditional economy– rational capitalist economy, as well as Cooley’s primary group–secondary group, Sorokin’s intimate relationship–contractual relationship, Redfield’s townsfolk society–civil society, Becker’s sacred society–secular society, and Fei Xiaotong’s etiquette society–legal society (Zhou, 2002: 139). Although no one today views the traditional–modern as absolutely opposite poles, and no longer insists on the development model of single-line evolution, and no longer simply thinks that the path that the Western countries have gone through must be the path that other countries will follow,2 people are still accustomed to discussing the themes related to change under the conceptual framework of the traditional– modern, regarding its development as the basic path of modernization. Since Comte and Spencer, various theories have been formed in the field of sociology in order to explain social changes, especially the social changes since industrialization. Among them, the influential or popular theories include the theory of evolution, the theory of circulation, the theory of function, the theory of conflict, and the theory of modernization. Influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, evolution theory views social changes as the natural succession of different historical stages. According to cycle theory, society is a living organism, which concerns the process of birth, growth, maturity, and aging. Functional theory holds that each part of society is an interdependent whole, which plays its respective role in the overall equilibrium, while the excessive or insufficient exchange of information or energy between subsystems may lead to structural changes inside or outside the system. The conflict theory holds that the power inequality in social life is the main cause of social repression and conflict, while the ubiquitous social conflict is the basic root of human social change. Finally, on the basis of Parsons’s structural function theory, in order to compete with the raging communism in the 1950s, and in addition to Marx’s class struggle theory of conflict, the modernization theory was established as a road of development and change for the underdeveloped countries with the United States as the standard. Based on the development experience of European and American countries, the modernization theory regards the road they have taken as a linear process of social changes that will or must affect all countries in the world.3 Theory is gray, the tree of life is always green. In the process of the emergence, formation, and modification of various theories of social change which are contradictory to each other, the world has been changing more and more rapidly in the 20th century, especially after World War II. Daniel Bell, an American sociologist, argues that two salient facts distinguish our society today from past history. First, the speed of change. Because the world is developing at an accelerated speed, “no longer would any child be able to live in the same kind of world—sociologically and intellectually—as his parents and

4

Social transition

grandparents had inhabited” (Bell, 1999: 170). Second, the scale of change, which, including population, economy, and knowledge, is growing at an unprecedented rate. The growth of population alone, especially the growth of the urban population, makes the social relations among people become increasingly complicated and diversified. Just as Engels commented that London had a huge benefit because of the population, so this massive concentration of 2.5 million people gathered in one region increases the power of 2.5 million 100 times (Engels, 1957: 303), and now there are at least a dozen cities in the world with more than ten times the population of London. Compared with the thousands of years that preceded it, the speed of change over the decades is often surprising. Eric Hobsbawm, a historian and sociologist, has written with keen observation and vivid prose that when a convict who was imprisoned in the 1950s came out of prison in Italy more than a decade later, he suddenly felt as if he had lived another life. In the late 1970s, vendors in a remote Mexican town, each with a Japanese calculator in his hand, settled accounts for tourists who had come from far away. Just a decade ago, no one in the area knew about calculators. Therefore, Hobsbawm says that by the 1960s, 80% of the world’s population found themselves suddenly ending their medieval lives (Hobsbawm, 1999: 435). However surprising, Hobsbawm’s exclamation was made over 50 years ago. In the last 50 years or so, the world has been moving forward with what Toffler calls “accelerating momentum” thanks to economic growth and technological advancement on a global scale (Toffler, 1970: 19). Electronic technology with the computer as the core, biotechnology, optical communication technology based on laser and optical fibers, marine engineering, space development, the utilization of new materials and new energy sources, as well as the biological genetic engineering symbolized by “cloning”, which is becoming more and more popular, have changed the relationship between human beings and nature irreversibly in the past decades. It was this series of changes that led to the arrival of the “post-industrial society” centered on information technology, which Daniel Bell first anticipated in 1962 (Bell, 1999: ciii). Manuel Castells writes in The Rise of the Network Society that in a short few decades, the new information technology revolution swept over the whole world with lightning speed, and its characteristic is “the immediate application to its own development of technologies it generates, connecting the world through information technology” (Castells, 2010a: 32). All this has created a whole new world in which: chips and computers are new; ubiquitous, mobile telecommunications are new; genetic engineering is new; electronically integrated, global financial markets working in real time are new; an interlinked capitalist economy embracing the whole planet, and not only some of its segments, is new; a majority of the urban labor force in knowledge and information processing in advanced economies is new; a majority of urban population in the planet is new; the demise of the Soviet Empire, the fading away of communism, and the end of the Cold War are new; the rise of the Asian Pacific

Social transition

5

as an equal partner in the global economy is new; the widespread challenge to patriarchalism is new; the universal consciousness on ecological preservation is new; and the emergence of a network society, based on a space of flows, and on timeless time, is historically new. (Castells, 2010b: 372) If, as Toffler says, we can divide 50,000 years of human history into 800 living generations (each divided into 62 years), it was six generations ago that we saw print, four generations ago that we were able to calculate time relatively accurately, two generations ago that we started using electric motors (Toffler, 1970: 14), and one generation ago that we started using television. So all of the new changes Castells is talking about happened in the second half of the last of the 800 generations, or 30 years. If we go back before 1978, the description here, especially of the global social changes that followed the scientific and technological revolution after World War II, has little to do with China, which for thousands of years was called the “central state”. At that time, China, using Castells’s language, was in a state of being “switched off” in relation to the new technology system (Castells, 2010a: 38). At the height of the Great Leap Forward in 1958, according to Mao Zedong’s vision, the Sixth Plenary Session of the Eighth CPC Central Committee pointed out that “the general feature of the current international situation is ‘the enemy continues to rot day by day, and we get better day by day’”, but for the next 20 years, the enemy did not rot, and we did not get better. We really got better after the reform and opening-up in 1978. There were many factors that stimulated Deng Xiaoping, the “chief designer of reform and opening-up”, to make his decisions, which include his belief of contributing to national rejuvenation from an early age, his early study in France, his painful experience in the unprecedented Cultural Revolution, his efforts to find the motivation for the “legalization” of socialism that was on the verge of collapse, and the “developed” reality of developed countries he witnessed later. In October 1978, during a visit to the Nissan factory in Japan, when Deng Xiaoping was informed that the labor productivity of Nissan was dozens of times that of China’s then most advanced Changchun First Automobile Factory, this pragmatic old man who never gave up sighed, “Only after coming here did I understand what modernization is” (Wu, 2010). Thus, at the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee held at the end of this year, when this “clear-headed” old man was replaced as the protagonist of the political scene, China, an ancient civilization with a history of 5,000 years, once again kicked off the changes and began to take off in a real sense. In different chapters of this book, we have described the changes in Chinese society since 1978. Although China’s economic aggregate has been growing since the reform and opening-up, its GDP has risen from 364.5 billion CNY in 1978 to 99,086.5 billion CNY in 2019, and it became the world’s second largest economic power after the United States in 2010, which serves as the most direct indicator of change in Chinese society, though the transformation of

6

Social transition

a country of 1.3 billion people over 1978–2020 is far from being represented by a single measure of GDP or economic growth. In 2009, John Naisbitt, the American futurologist best known for his book Megatrend, was inspired by the powerful influence of the rapid changes in Chinese society, and moved his research institute to Tianjin, China. He described eight changing trends in this land under the title of “China trend” (Naisbitt & Naisbitt, 1990), the narrative thread of which provides the most succinct account of a social transformation that has spanned more than 30 years: (a) Emancipating the mind: The reform and opening-up allowed the Chinese people to abandon the shackles of ideology and see the reality of what China could be. With this in mind, the Chinese gave up class warfare, and while the economy grew, the structure of society changed dramatically. Meanwhile, the number of college graduates, a reserve force for the middle class, rose from 165,000 in 1978 to nearly 7 million in 2014. (b) A combination of “top-down” and “bottom-up”: The power of the former is based on more than 40 years of achievement, and most people believe that government can lead the country forward; the latter is based on the realization that the people must enjoy a fuller democracy. Therefore, while Yu Keping said “democracy is a good thing” (Yu, 2006), thousands of people in Xiamen and Shanghai expressed their democratic demands rationally and intelligently by a way of “walking”, which led to the abandonment of the PX chemical project and the maglev project advocated by the local government. (c) Planning the “forest” and letting “trees” grow freely: If the “forest” means country, society, and group, then “trees” mean the various individuals that grow in it. Today, people do have freedom of choice, from the nature of the organization they belong to, their occupation, their profession, their income, to what they wear, what they like, where they live, and how they live. (d) Crossing the river by feeling the stones: This is a brilliant reform maxim in the same vein as Deng Xiaoping’s “cat theory”, whose core is to be bold and unconstrained by rules and regulations. From 1980 to 2020, Shenzhen, a small fishing village, became a metropolis second only to Shanghai and Beijing in terms of population and GDP. Wang Shi, who started by selling corn, built Wanke into one of the top three real estate companies in China. (e) The budding of art and academia: Although “Qian Xuesen’s question” still makes the Chinese government and academia embarrassed and uneasy, at least ten universities are aiming to be world class. In the free field of art, China not only inherits much classical art, but also is becoming an experimental field for all kinds of popular and avant-garde art. “From music, songs, films, media, fashion and hairstyle, the trend of popular culture starts to become ‘the weathervane of social change’, and also becomes the basic mode of the film system” (Cui, 2010: 183). Just a few years ago, in Nanjing in the autumn of 2010, I watched Taiwan drama director Lai Shengchuan’s The Treasure Island Family. More importantly, I, who grew up in the “military compound” of the Communist Party, can now openly lament the fate

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of the “Kuomintang soldiers” and their descendants in the “military compound” in Taiwan.4 (f) Integration into the world: Before 1978, when the friends of China were said to be all over the world, I knew only the beacon of the Mediterranean—Albania, a tiny country of little more than a million people, and Prince Sihanouk, who was deposed and exiled to China. Thanks to Deng Xiaoping’s policy of opening-up, the millions of people who have been abroad, including me, have really found out what “a distant land is near” or “global village” means. After China joined the WTO in 2001, people began to talk about the G20, G8, and even G2 when goods with the “Made in China” logo flowed around the world. For the first time, China became an important member of the world family. (g) Freedom and fairness: For all the complaints about the fairness of reality in China, the freedom it has must be far greater than it was 42 years ago. By contrast, the Naisbitts, who know China well, have not embarrassed the Chinese government by their handling of the subject, and pointed to the latter’s efforts to deal with the tension between the freedom of the few to achieve economic success and the fair demands of the many for social services. For example, with the high marketization and the rise of the wealth class,5 the country in recent years has also been trying to change various unfair social management systems, including the household registration system, employment system, education system, and medical system, and striving to realize a universal social security system, including for the rural population. (h) From Olympic gold medals to Nobel prizes: These are not limited to sports or technology; they are simply symbols of China’s ability to catch up with the world in a certain field. Indeed, not only have the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo surprised the world, but China has also led the world in a number of areas. In 2008, astronaut Zhai Zhigang became the first Chinese to walk in space when he stepped off the Shenzhou VII spacecraft; the ARJ21 is part of China’s ambitious effort to develop large jets after its successful entry into the world regional jet market; on December 3, 2010, the test speed of the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed railway under construction reached 486 kilometers per hour, setting a new world record, and China became the world’s leading advanced country in the field of high-speed railways with an operating mileage of 35,000 kilometers by 2019 (Xinhua News Agency, 2010a). Since the birth of modern social science, countless scholars have devoted their lives to explaining social changes and their causes in the past 200 years. The forces of history are found to be manifold, ranging from the natural environment, economic growth, technological innovation, and cultural integration to the subjective efforts of individuals, especially elites. It can almost be said that there are as many ways of describing social change as there are ways of studying society (Chirot, 1986: 2).

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Some people strongly believe that the disappearance of the great Mayan civilization, which had flourished for centuries, was more or less related to the drought caused by El Niño in the 8th and 9th centuries AD (Fagan, 2009: 128–147), just as the drought in Asia during the warm period of the Middle Ages reduced the grassland areas and killed a large number of livestock, resulting in nomads having to expand their search for pasture and water and then invading neighboring territories—thus the iron feet of Genghis Khan swept across the Asian continent (Fagan, 2008: 52). Some people are convinced that economic growth, especially the change of economic form, is the most serious subject of social change, because with the change of the economic base, all large superstructures change slowly or rapidly (Marx & Engels, 1973, Vol. 2: 83). It is also believed that “in the radical gap between the present and the past, technology has been one of the chief forces in the diremption of social time” (Bell, 1999: 188). Just as the steam engine represented the arrival of industrial society, electronic technology, especially computer technology, represented the arrival of post-industrial society or the information society. Even Lenin once thought, at the extreme, that communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country (Lenin, 1995: 363). Some also believe that change is caused by the clash and blending of cultures, including values, behavior patterns, and materials. Since Arnold Toynbee in “Historical studies” proposed that the challenge and response of civilizations brought about the cyclic development of society, Huntington further discussed the conflict between different civilizations in the modern world and its role in the reconstruction of the world order. The non-Western world responds to the dual challenges posed by modernization and Westernization in three ways: total rejection, total acceptance, and acceptance of the former and rejection of the latter (Huntington, 2010: 51). Finally, there is the conviction that great people, especially those with Weber’s “charisma” (Weber, 1978: 245), drive history. Therefore, Pareto regarded human history as the history of the elite circle of the “lion” and the “fox” (Pareto, 1968). Thomas Carlyle also said that the history of the world is the history of the great men who lived in it (Diamond, 2006: 453). Although those of us who have been steeped in the materialism of “the masses make history” would be wary of the elitism or “heroic view of history” expressed in these discourses, it is also true that even the history of modern China after 1949 is closely related to the existence of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping and their radically different styles of doing things. For China after 1978, we can say that almost all of the above historical factors have been involved in the great changes of Chinese society. In view of the fact that China is an ancient land of 9.6 million square kilometers, with a population of 1.3 billion, with 5,000 years of civilized tradition, after 1840’s precarious fate and the establishment of a rigid system after 1949, perhaps none of the single historical factors mentioned above are responsible for the huge changes in this ultra-stable society. In fact, we are far from having a complete picture of what has happened to the country from 1978 to 2020, and why. But, as far as this argument is

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concerned, we believe that it is this unprecedented transformation that has created a huge gap between the generations now living in Chinese society and the theme we are now discussing—cultural reverse, the self-evident theme of our society.

Old habits and new rules No sooner had I written this heading than I was reminded of an intergenerational conflict that occurred a few years ago among some acquaintances. Small as it is, it does illustrate the inherent logic of intergenerational tension and conflict at a time when rapid social change has made old habits and new rules coexist. Doctor A has always been a good girl. Although she was born in a county in H province, which is not developed, she has always been cared for by her parents and teachers since childhood because of her excellent academic performance. She got her doctorate from a university in the south and taught there when she was only around twenty-seven years old. Before long, ambitious A married her high-powered classmate B, who had no doctorate. After graduating from the rural area of J province, B had successfully changed his profession to become a practicing lawyer in the same city and obtained the master of law degree. Although both of them had just started to work for a short time, and did not live a rich life, because of their good careers and their love for each other, their life was enviable. The trouble came when A went back with B to his hometown in J province after marriage. Originally, B’s parents were really happy beyond words, thinking of how they had brought up their son with all kinds of hardships over the past decades and sent him into a famous university, as well as how he has become a lawyer in the provincial capital and married a woman doctor whom people in the countryside had never seen. A, who was not used to the countryside, was surrounded by villagers on the third floor of B’s house; although she felt a little uncomfortable, she was happy to meet her parents-in-law for the first time. However, after a short period of excitement, A and her parents-in-law encountered a problem: According to the custom in B’s hometown, the new daughterin-law should wash her mother-in-law’s feet once to show her obedience to the seniors and filial piety. This was the first time well-educated A had ever heard of the custom of asking someone to wash the feet of a woman whom she had met for the first time at noon, and this made her almost cry. However, B’s parents didn’t offer any alternatives to this custom just because A was a doctor. In their eyes, A is in the first place their daughter-in-law, and then a doctor! I really do not know if A washed her future mother-in-law’s feet, and I do not need to know. But those of us who study sociology know that the conflict here would not have happened a hundred years ago or a hundred years from now. A hundred years ago, in that “where the needle goes, the thread follows” era for women, before a woman got married, her parents would have long ago told her to honor her in-laws, and washing feet is but a certain ritual of filial

10 Social transition piety; one hundred years later, in an era when men and women are becoming more equal, at least in legal terms, and the supremacy of the older generation is gone, perhaps only parents whose brains have been run over by cars will want their new daughter-in-law to wash their feet. So the problem here is not with B’s parents, and certainly not with A, but rather with the juxtaposition of old habits and new rules that comes with the passing of the old and the new—in this sense, both parents and children are somehow out of time. At the beginning of Chapter 4 in the first volume of this book, we fully discussed how, in a transitional society with rapid changes, the coexistence of old habits and new rules is a common phenomenon. But the problem is that, because the pace of change is so rapid, so much has changed in the course of a generation—as Toffler puts it, it is like taking what should have happened in a 100 or 300-year period and bringing it all together in a compressed way in a single 10, 20, or 30- year period such that it cannot but cause some kind of “future shock” to two or three generations living at the same time. Indeed, a change at such a rate between the old and the new is sobering to the customs, beliefs, and self-images of millions of people. Never before in history has such a rapid change occurred at such a rate in such a short historical period (Toffler, 1970: 25–26). Such a rapid change will inevitably lead to the endless emergence of new things and new rules, and the two interdependent results of it are, on the one hand, the parents’ original knowledge, experience, and even value judgment lose their explanatory power and inheritance value, and, on the other hand, it gives the children their first chance to “give directions” to their parents. This is actually the external macro-background of the phenomenon of “cultural reverse” caused by social changes. In all kinds of ball games, we often see this phenomenon, that is, the players who are very good and even hold the world championship title lose the game, because they cannot adapt to the new rules, while those unknown newcomers often stand out. Today’s world is a vast arena where the real competition is between the older generation and the younger generation, and the reasons for the former’s loss of dominance and the latter’s emergence are often the same as those in ball games: there are new changes and new rules. In the face of these changes and new rules, the older generation, familiar with the old habits, is at a loss, while the younger generation, brought up with the new rules, is at ease with them. Worldwide, these new changes occurred after World War II, especially after the increasingly rapid globalization that we have already talked about and will continue to talk about since the 1980s. It was the enormous social changes triggered by technological progress that allowed innovations, both tangible and intangible, to proliferate rapidly, thanks to the almost unimpeded flow of capital and culture across the globe that had followed the end of the Cold War. New things and changes like feminism, democracy, “dink” culture, single-parent families, supermarkets, Greenpeace, WTO, the white-collar class, and consumerism in the social life field accompanied by scientific and technological progress have not only deepened our understanding of the changing nature of society,

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but also changed many game rules previously regarded as natural. As a result, the older generation, like the immigrants who arrived in the New World on the Mayflower in 1620, suddenly found themselves in a completely foreign environment, and as Margaret Mead said, accidentally became “time migrants” (Mead, 1970: 73). The changes in Chinese society from 1978 to 2020 have attracted worldwide attention. They are bringing the older generation from tradition into the modern age at a very fast speed, making their previously almost extravagant ideal into a reality. At the same time, the older generation also abandons much of the knowledge and experience they have acquired in the first half of their lives, and they feel that they are the first generation that cannot leave a spiritual “legacy” for their children. In our interviews, many parents feel that their youth has been delayed, that they have learned nothing when they should have studied, while their children have encountered the great era of reform and opening-up. Therefore, it is inevitable that their children surpass them. In addition, as a special case, China’s rural areas are further away from modernization, so the changes, shocks, and setbacks experienced by the people there are the most intense in the current transition from tradition to modernity (Zhou, 1998). In the interviews in Beijing, we found that in the two families of BV and BW in Zhejiang village, parents’ dual immigrant status—they are, in the words of Margaret Mead, “time migrants” from tradition to modernity and “space migrants” from country to city—made their “spiritual backwardness” more obvious than in other parents. Specifically, while their children are already comfortable in Beijing, they are still struggling to adapt to modern city life. BWF simply said, “I wouldn’t stay in Beijing for a day if it weren’t for earning a few bucks” (BWF, 1995). Almost 20 years later, similar stories are still being told, but the details have changed. SAF, 45, graduated from the College of Mining and Technology in Xiangtan, Hunan province. After graduation, he gave up his job as a mining engineer in his hometown to do business in Shanghai because he was passionately in love with his classmate SAM. He set up a company in Shanghai that did heating engineering, which was small but had dozens of employees. Since he was adopted as a son by his uncle at an early age, he had to support his biological and adoptive parents, as well as a large number of siblings. He had been staying in Shanghai and could not personally take care of his parents back home in Sichuan, so he was kind and guilty enough to help any sibling in trouble. As a result, his money was not only spent like water, but also his small business had become a “poverty relief” base for the members of his extended family, where more than 30% of the employees were his relatives. More relatives in the company means more trouble, and the SAF couple were exhausted by their relatives’ various demands. The son that majored in economics in Shanghai Finance and Economics Institute could not stand it any more, and accused his father of having no modern ideas about business. Although SAF knew his son had a point, he could not follow this modern principle—“They are all children of my brothers and sisters. If I don’t

12 Social transition help them now, I won’t have the face to pay New Year’s greetings to their parents when I go back home during the Spring Festival” (SAF, 2012). But an accident later led SAF to admit that it was a mistake not to have accepted his son’s advice earlier. His nephew who had not been working well was driving drunk, which caused big trouble. Finally, SAF made up his mind to fire his nephew. If rapid social change is a major reason why older generations have lost the value of passing on their knowledge and experience, and are thus unable to cope with the changing times, then the next question is why children can “feel good” in the face of all these changes while their parents struggle to cope. Obviously, in the face of the same change, the two generations must have completely different reactions, or they would not form such a big difference in values, life attitudes, and social behavior patterns, and the cultural reverse we are discussing would not be formed. Therefore, there are differences between the two generations in understanding and accepting new things, which may be the internal micro-reason of the phenomenon of cultural reverse triggered by social changes. Specifically, there are many reasons why the older generation is slow and backward in the face of the same social changes. Generally speaking, there are no more than the following aspects. First, according to the laws of biology, with the increase of age, one’s values, life attitudes, and behavior patterns become fixed, and one pays less attention to new things and loses interest in many things. Next, for parents born in the particular period of history, from the 1950s to the 1970s, and for the grandparents before them, the conservative and closed social atmosphere and irregular school education before 1978 left many of them with a very low cultural foundation. They cannot read all 26 letters of the English language, let alone absorb new knowledge and cultures that keep emerging. Last but not least, almost all respondents said that the shackles of tradition and experience are often the main reason why the older generation is missing out on new things and trends. In a 1998 interview with NFF, a professor of sociology born in 1948 whom we have mentioned in many places in this book, we analyzed how tradition and experience shackled the thinking and action of the older generation. We usually deal with things according to the original experience, and only when the original knowledge and experience are not enough, we will think of learning new things. The reason for this is very simple. This knowledge and experience comes from your own practice, and not only is it familiar to you, but it even forms a part of you, or what you call your “self”, so you can no more easily deny it than you can deny yourself. However, this “heritage”, which is both proud and more poignant, is sometimes a historical burden, which makes you either indifferent or unprepared to face new things. Children are different, they do not have any experience, but therefore no burden, they learn and use everything new, so they have more new knowledge and are more adaptable than us. And, fortunately for the

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children of my son NFB’s generation, the two decades they have spent growing up have almost entirely overlapped with the changes in Chinese society. As they grow up, the constraints of society are gradually being relaxed, and they are hardly subjected to any spiritual restrictions. Therefore, all the deviant events that are new to us and sometimes subversive in these 20 years are the most natural for them. (NFF, 1998) The NFF interviews already touch on part of the reason why children form their own “cultural power” or “discourse power”, that is, the younger generation is not hobbled by old habits and old knowledge or traditions. For the older generation, when new knowledge or rules appear that are inconsistent with old experiences and traditions, new knowledge or rules may be regarded as weird; but for the younger generation, who have no stereotypes in their heads, new knowledge or new rules are taken for granted. Not restricted by old traditions, coupled with a strong curiosity, quick absorption ability, and a solid foundation in today’s formal education (in our interviews, almost all parents admitted that what they had learned in school was at least five years behind where their children are now),7 today’s younger generation is naturally more adaptable to new things than their parents and grandparents. This puts the old habits and the new rules in two different camps. On the side of the old habits stand three generations born before 1960 (Zhang & Cheng, 1988); on the other side of the new rules stand the post-1970s or post-1980s generation that grew up after the reform and opening-up, and the generation that grew up naturally in the course of our study for more than 20 years—the post-1990s or even post-2000s. In fact, there is only one stark divide between the five generations: the “great proletarian cultural revolution”, which lasted for ten years from 1966 to 1976. We have discussed in Chapter 2 of the first volume of this book that, although countless people with lofty ideals have fought hard to overthrow the old traditions of the feudal society that lasted for thousands of years since modern times, a violent revolution aimed at fighting against feudal and colonial culture has unexpectedly formed a stronger “new tradition” in the 30 years after its victory (Walder, 1986).8 According to sociologist Edward Shils, “at a minimum, two transmissions over three generations are required for a pattern of belief or action to be considered a tradition” (Shils, 1981: 15). In this sense, the formation of the “new tradition” of Mao Zedong’s revolution is the most economical cultural inheritance in human history, and it has become the guide for action of 1 billion Chinese people effected over the shortest time. In the 30 years after 1949, the rapid formation and spread of the new tradition was attributed to: the model set by the October Revolution of the Soviet Union, the devastating victory of the Chinese revolution and the extraordinary charisma of the great leader in the revolutionary process, the highly centralized political and economic system of omnipotence established after 1949, the nearly perfect social mobilization system established by modern bureaucracy (Zhou, 2005), the various political study and ideological

14 Social transition reform movement determined to shape “new socialists” like Lei Feng and “the good eight company on the Nanjing Road” (Whyte, 1974), the mutually reinforcing social mindsets of hundreds of millions of people formed in the highly integrated social system and series of achievements in the early years of the founding of the People’s Republic of China (Zhou, 2009b), and various punishment systems including “bathing” (Yang, 2004), decentralization, public criticism, and “re-education through labor”. In this way, the victory of the revolution overthrew the imperial power, but did not remove the shadow of feudalism centered on high centralization and the personality cult. It promoted China’s industrialization, but the Soviet-style planned economy also restricted the development of the commodity and market economy. It eradicated the rule of blood families, but the all-encompassing system of units and rural people’s communes reduced people’s creativity and competition consciousness after restricting their freedom of movement and migration. In the end, it destroyed the Confucian feudal ethics and the nascent bourgeois ideology, but the living, innovative Marxism finally became the dogma that restrained the creativity of the masses. Under the influence of this social atmosphere, the Chinese nation with a population of 1 billion developed a highly politicized and highly homogenized or “depersonalized” social mentality. It can be said that from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution, a series of political manias, rarely seen in the world, existed and were all direct products of this social mentality. These new traditions include ideological dogmas that bind people, rigid systems, backward ideas, and far-left habits, which, like the old traditions left over from Chinese society in 1949, existed together in China before 1978, often with contradictions and conflicts, but sometimes with surprising similarities. During the reform and opening-up from 1978, while abandoning the far-left line of “class struggle as the key”, Chinese society underwent a great transformation or change step by step. It is this social transformation, which has lasted for more than 42 years and has not ended yet, coupled with the same huge wave of globalization after China’s integration into the world, that has laid the foundation for the birth of all kinds of new rules when all kinds of old and new traditions are gradually turned into old habits that do not adapt to social progress. And millions of older generations, once suffering from old habits, are now facing a relentless challenge to the new rules.

Social transformation: who fumbles for stones and who crosses rivers? As early as 1928, German sociologist Karl Mannheim put the hope of social change on natural generation replacement when he wrote his article “The generation problem” (Mannheim, 1952). More than 50 years later, American sociologist Edward Shils, in his book On Tradition, which took him 25 years to write, continues along Mannheim’s lines:

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Much has been made of the changes in culture and social organization which are made possible by the succession of generations. Each generation comes to its task with a fresh mind, unencumbered by the beliefs and attachments settled in the minds of the generation antecedent to it. . . . Each new generation seems to have the chance to begin again, to call a halt to the persistence of the past into the present and to make its society anew. It suffers from the handicap of weakness, isolation, and helplessness in the face of many others who have already fallen into the grip of the past. (Shils, 1981: 35) Changes in Chinese society before 1978 were also caused by generational changes. Autumn 1975 to autumn 1976 was an eventful historical period in contemporary China. First, in August 1975, Zhumadian district of Henan province was hit by a huge rainstorm. Within a few days, the maximum central rainfall reached 1,631 mm and the maximum 24-hour rainfall reached 1,060 mm, setting a record for the same index in China. Rainstorms caused dozens of reservoirs to collapse, devastating 11 million mu of farmland, affecting 11 million people, and killing 26,000 people. On March 8, the following year, a rare meteorite shower fell in Jilin, China. It was spread over 500 square kilometers and comprised more than 100 meteorites, with a total weight of 2,600 kilograms. Then, at 3:42 am on July 28, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake occurred in Tangshan, Hebei province, with an epicenter intensity of 11 degrees and a focal depth of 12 kilometers—an earthquake area of 47 square kilometers. The new heavy industry city of Tangshan was immediately reduced to ruins. According to the statistics released two decades later, the death toll in the earthquake was 242,000, with 164,000 seriously injured and countless minor injuries. Up until 2010, Aftershock, directed by Feng Xiaogang, set a box office record as it generated the tears of the Chinese people, indicating that this earthquake and the subsequent Wenchuan earthquake will continue to be a lingering pain in the hearts of Chinese people forever. Many years later, the economist Zhao Haijun talked about the “turbulence” in 1976 and said with a mysterious tone, “Every time something unusual happens in nature, it is a sign of something human” (Zhao, 2009: 285). Believe it or not, Premier Zhou Enlai died on January 8, 1976, five months after the heavy rains in Zhumadian; on July 6, 1976, three months after the Jilin meteor shower, Zhu De, chairman of the standing committee of the National People’s Congress, died; more than a month after the Tangshan earthquake, Mao Zedong, the Communist Party chairman who defeated Chiang Kai-shek and launched the Cultural Revolution, died on September 9, 1976. This means that three of China’s four first major Communist Party leaders died in 1976, with the exception of Chairman Liu Shaoqi, who was “knocked down” by Mao Zedong at the start of the Cultural Revolution and died in Kaifeng, Henan province, in 1969. Generational shifts can be placid but eerie. Deng Xiaoping is the kind of person who was knocked down by the “fists” of history several times, but jumped out of its “clutches” every time. In July 1977,

16 Social transition the year after Mao Zedong’s death, Deng Xiaoping, after a lifetime of “three ups and downs”, finally regained his breakthrough, and became the de facto leader of China, a country of 1 billion people. Thus, the Communist Party’s power shifted to a second generation of leaders represented by this pragmatic little man, and, most important of all, this generational change of leadership brought with it an opportunity for change in Chinese society as a whole. It was also the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) that identified three epochal changes affecting the following decades: from “class struggle as the key” to economic construction as the center; from closed and semi-closed to being open to the outside world; from conformism to comprehensive reform in all areas of social and economic life. Thus the curtain of social transformation was officially opened at the end of 1978. Centering on the great social transformation starting from 1978, it has been proposed to establish a distinctive sociology of transformation according to the characteristics of Chinese society. For example, Ambrose King proposed that there are at least two aspects worth considering when talking about the transformation of Chinese society: social transformation, that is, the transformation from one social form to another; and the transitional society, that is, the society in transition, holding that China may be such a society for quite a long time (King, 2009). Qin Xiao proposed that economic development and “market-oriented reform are part of the transformation of modernity”, but “the miracle of economic growth can only be called the ‘China story’, and the formation of the ‘China model’ must be marked by social transformation” (Qin, 2009: 21, 27). Sun Liping, whom we mentioned in Chapter 1 of the first volume of this book, proposed that the communist civilization and its transformation, including China, the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe, are of great significance to the development of sociology. The study of the characteristics, operational logic and transformation of this civilization should become a new source of inspiration and power for the development of contemporary sociology and even the whole social science. (Sun, 2005) It can be said that from the construction of the “four modernizations” proposed in the late Mao Zedong era to the “economic system reform” in the Deng Xiaoping era to the overall transformation of the whole society, the fields and contents involved are very broad, and the exploration of the sociology of transformation requires a high degree of abstraction and theoretical generalization of reality. However, everyone who has come all the way from 1978 to 2020 will never forget the landmark changes that have taken place in every field of social life since 1978. It is these changes that combine into a spectacular transformation picture: The first milestone was the establishment of four special economic zones in Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou and Xiamen in August 1980. The construction of the zone began with Yuan Geng, the venerable reform-minded old man we

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repeatedly referred to in our account of the Shekou incident of 1988. In June 1978, appointed by Ye Fei, Yuan Geng, then director of the Foreign Affairs Bureau of the Ministry of Communications, went to Hong Kong to investigate the business situation of the China Merchants Bureau established in 1872. As a result, compared with other enterprises in Hong Kong, the dismal business of China Merchants Bureau made Yuan Geng, who later became the 29th “leader” of China Merchants Bureau, have the idea of reform. In 1979, with the approval of the central government, the Shekou industrial zone, which China Merchants Bureau was responsible for organizing and implementing, was established, which laid the foundation for the central government’s idea of developing special economic zones. In April, Deng Xiaoping supported the idea of Xi Zhongxun, the party secretary of Guangdong province, to set up processing zones in Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shantou, adjacent to Hong Kong and Macao. The following year, the state council approved the establishment of four special economic zones, including the above-mentioned three cities and Xiamen. Then, in early 1984, 14 coastal cities, including Shanghai, Tianjin, Dalian, Qingdao, Guangzhou, Wenzhou and Beihai, opened up to the outside world and set up economic and technological development zones. In 1988, Hainan special zone was established; in 1990, Shanghai Pudong development zone was established . . . More than 40 years have passed. Today, the development of special economic zones, especially Shenzhen, has demonstrated its exemplary and guiding role in China’s social transformation. The second milestone was the pilot program of “production quotas to households” in Xiaogang village, Fengyang county, Anhui province in 1978. Since the land reform in 1949, Mao Zedong had been determined to realize the collectivization of Chinese agriculture and eradicate the disadvantages of the small-scale peasant economy, which had triggered fierce struggles within the party many times (Zhou, 1998). But collectivization and the people’s communes did not solve the problem of feeding Chinese peasants, and the 30 million people who starved to death in 1960–1962 still haunt those who grew up in those days. Then it happened in Xiaogang village that year. On the night of November 24, 18 ordinary farmers risked their jail time by pressing their handprints and signing an agreement of “production quotas to households”. The following year, an unprecedented harvest gave Wan Li, then the party secretary of the province, the confidence to support Xiaogang’s “deviation”. In September 1980, the central government issued a document affirming for the first time the reform action of “production quotas to households”, which triggered the reform of China’s rural areas. At the end of that year, farmers in Guanghan county in Sichuan took the lead in removing the brand of the people’s commune. Three years later, in October, the people’s commune system, which had been implemented for 25 years, officially came to an end (Ling, 1996; Zhang, 1998). The third milestone was the creation of a Sino-foreign joint venture, while also vitalizing the “red capitalists”. After the victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949, although capitalists did not suffer from the same catastrophe as the

18 Social transition landlord class, after the socialist transformation of industry and commerce in 1956, China’s national capitalists and small capitalists had completely retired from the field of economic production, and were severely criticized as a representative of the exploiting class in the Cultural Revolution in 1966. On January 17, 1979, in the midst of spring in Beijing, Deng Xiaoping invited Rong Yiren, “king of flour”, Gu Yanxiu, “king of bristles”, Hu Zi’ang, “king of steel”, Hu Juewen, “king of machinery”, and Zhou Shitao, “king of cement”— the famous “five masters of industry and commerce”—to the Great Hall of the People for a discussion and a hotpot dinner. Several of them asked the central government to remove their “capitalist” title, but Deng Xiaoping seemed more interested in putting it back. Soon after, the China International Trust and Investment Corporation, in which Rong Yiren invested shares and served as President, was set up, not long after the Sino-foreign Joint Venture Law was passed. In the following decades, China has become a vital place for entrepreneurship with capital investment from all over the world. Thousands of Sinoforeign joint ventures and even wholly foreign-owned companies have not only brought capital, but also brought market concepts, talents, and technologies, making their own contributions to China’s economic revitalization. The fourth milestone is the development of the individual economy and private economy, while encouraging “some people to get rich first”. Shortly after the above hot pot banquet, the central government announced their intention to “encourage and support the proper development of the individual economy, and all law-abiding individual workers should be respected by the society” (Zhao, 2009: 328), firstly because of the change of the concept of individual economy, and secondly because of the employment pressure brought by the return of 8 million educated youth to the city. Soon, Rong Zhiren, a young man in Huicheng, Guangzhou, opened a small restaurant. Nian Guangjiu, a native of Wuhu, Anhui province, established the famous Fool’s Melon Seeds. In 1979 alone, the number of individual businesses approved to open reached 100,000. Since then, despite several twists and turns, China’s private and individual economies have been booming. Article 11 of the 1999 Amendment to the Constitution states: “The individual economy, the private economy and other non-public sectors within the scope prescribed by law are important components of the socialist market economy” (Amendment to the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, 1999). Several of my friends, Jiang Xipei, a native of Yixing, Jiangsu province, who set up stalls in Hefei in the 1980s, later became a cable king and a representative of the 16th CPC National Congress. Chen Guangbiao, a Huaiyin man who set up stalls in Nanjing in the 1990s, later became the king of renewable resources and the national “best man” and moral model for his years of continuous and unremitting “social donations” and his selfless and fearless behavior during the Wenchuan earthquake. Although many scholars, including Qin Xiao, have pointed out that no single economic or market transformation can replace the modern transformation of Chinese society—“The transformation of modernity refers to the transformation from traditional society to the modern civilized order supported by modern core

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values (freedom, rationality and individual rights), with market economy, democratic constitutionalism and nation-state as the basic system” (Qin, 2009: 18)— we can still believe that it is these changes in economic life that have laid the foundation for the comprehensive transformation of Chinese society that has made this country of 1.3 billion people begin to shift in the following directions. First, along the path of industrialization from 1949 to 1978, it continued to realize the transformation from an agriculture-oriented society to an industryoriented and service-oriented society. In the 30 years from 1978 to 2008, the number of employees in primary industry decreased from 70.5 to 39.56%, the number of employees in secondary industry increased from 17.3 to 27.24%, and the number of employees in tertiary industry increased from 12.2 to 33.17%. The change of industrial structure not only promotes the growth of new economic forms, but also promotes the differentiation of China’s social structure, giving birth to the growing Chinese middle class (Zhou, 2005). Second, and most important, is the transition from a command planned economy to a modern market economy. This transition has gone through many complicated processes. First, the transition was from one “based on planned economy, supplemented by market regulation” to a planned commodity economy; then in 1992, the 14th National Congress of the Communist Party of China explicitly established the socialist market economy system, “making the market play a fundamental role in the allocation of resources under the macrocontrol of a socialist country” (CPC Central Committee, 1993); finally, at the Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee held in 2013, not only was the adverbial “under the macro-control of country” deleted (actually further withdrawing state intervention in the market), but the basic role of the market in the allocation of resources was revised to “decisive role” (CPC Central Committee, 2013: 21). So far, though, China has yet to truly embrace the two basic prerequisites of a market economy, both hard and soft: There is neither a perfect constitution and private property protection system as a “soft indicator” nor a social security system as a “hard constraint”, though the push to the market laid the groundwork for China’s economic take-off. Thirdly, there is the change from the highly ideological monistic culture to the ideological secular multi-culture. As we have already stated in the first volume of this book, the changes in Chinese culture, or Chinese values, attitudes, and patterns of behavior, over the years from 1978 to 2020, while often overlooked, are, like China’s economic growth, one of the most dynamic and colorful areas of social transformation in the country. In a series of papers I have published, I proposed that while paying attention to a series of experiences accumulated in China’s socio-economic development and structural transformation, namely the “Chinese experience”, we should also pay attention to the great changes of Chinese people’s values and social mentality in these years. I call this transmutation the “Chinese feeling” (Zhou, 2009b, 2010), and believe that it is possible to “provide a social or psychological model for

20 Social transition developing countries around the world to learn from the transition from tradition to modernity because of its uniqueness” (Zhou & Qin, 2010a). Fourthly, there is the transition from a highly centralized political system to a socialist democratic political system. Although this transformation was the most delayed and caused the most controversy, the economic growth was accompanied by a considerable degree of “suspension of the political system reform” (Qin, 2009: 21); since the abolition of the lifelong leadership system in the 1980s, the implementation of “villagers’ autonomy”, and the strengthening of grassroots democracy, the transformation has not stopped completely, and is causing further concern. The rapid transformation has brought great changes to Chinese society, and inevitably brought contradictions and conflicts to the whole society. Against the background of changes and transformation, “profound changes in the economic system, profound changes in the social structure, profound adjustments in the pattern of interests and profound changes in ideology” (CPC Central Committee, 2006: 3) have become the basic characteristics of our complex times. And from what we are talking about, it is clear that different generations of people born and raised in different times of this society, due to their different life experiences, different educational backgrounds, different constraints from tradition and experience, and different interests and concerns in today’s social structure, naturally have a different identification and adaptation to change and transformation. What bothers parents is that the new generation doesn’t know the past. They don’t know the “new youth” of the 1920s, the “red brat” of the 1930s, the “eighth route army” of the 1940s, the “builders” of the 1950s, the “red guards” of the 1960s, the “educated youth” of the 1970s, or the “fourth generation” of the 1980s. They are a generation without history and have nothing to do with everything that has happened in the last 80 years. They were born at the end of all tragedies, but they still have experienced more change than their peers in other countries, because they grow up in the country that changes the most. No difference in the lives of two generations in the world is as great as that of the Chinese . . . They believe that the world has changed, that it will no longer belong to the meek, but to the independent will; no longer to belong to “two fears”, but to new technology; no longer to belong to power, but to wisdom; no longer to belong to the honest, but to the ambitious; no longer to belong to their parents, but to themselves. Mao Zedong is in grandpa’s heart, grandpa is in dad’s heart, and they have themselves in their hearts. (Ling, 2008: 334) Ling Zhijun, a political writer, offers a glimpse of the differences between the two living generations today. Perhaps the biggest difference, of course, is that the older generation is one with a history, connected to the last 60 or 80 years, while the younger generation is one without a history, but they are connected

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with the changed present and a future that will continue to change. In fact, it is this difference that leads to the two generations’ different attitudes towards change or transformation. Because the older generation views the changing present and future as uncertain and even dangerous, they naturally rely on cautious attempts to “cross the river by feeling the stones” in the face of this change. The younger generation, on the other hand, sees the changing present and the future as a natural journey, and while their parents and grandparents “feel the stones”, they have waded across the river, leaving behind them the mighty river. Over the past 42 years, countless young people have weathered the vicissitudes of the times and achieved magnificent lives. In fact, “You feel the stones and I cross the river” is not treachery or self-interest or unfilialness. From the experience of human history, the predecessors of each generation accumulate experience and explore risks through their own actions of “feeling the stones” for the next generation, while the ease of the younger generation in “crossing the river” depends on that older generation having felt the stones.

Globalization and the consumer storm Social transformation is only one aspect of the process of social change that China have gone through since 1978. From the very beginning we have affirmed that our discussion of the intergenerational relationship of Chinese society marked by the phenomenon of cultural reverse will take place against the background of globalization. In other words, we are clearly aware that social transformation and globalization are two interwoven basic issues here, which are so closely intertwined, first of all, because they are both changes that have occurred in Chinese society since the 1980s. As a synchronic social transformation process, globalization, by virtue of the flow of capital, technology, goods, services, and labor across countries and regions, enables the mode of production, lifestyle, and even cultural expression represented by the United States and other Western developed countries to be expanded or popularized globally. As a diachronic process, social transformation is led by market transformation, which then triggers the huge changes in various fields of Chinese society. In fact, social transformation is not so much an inevitable result of globalization as the great transformation of China, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and other former socialist camps, paving the way for the true “globalization”. In the field of daily life, one of the most direct effects of globalization on Chinese society is the wave of consumerism that has spread—in a country that had previously advocated thrift or hard work since 1949—and which has ever since become increasingly vigorous. From our discussion of cultural reverse or changes in intergenerational relationships, China’s rapid economic growth in 1978–2020 and the changes in the material living conditions of different generations brought about by this growth, especially the changes in the consumption environment, are the biggest social and environmental differences encountered by two or three generations living today. Therefore, it is one of the most

22 Social transition important reasons for their different values, life attitudes, and social behaviors. In a presentation on the growth of China’s middle class at the Brookings Institution in Washington in the fall of 2009, I proposed that in the 30 years of China’s social reform and opening-up, consumption reflecting lifestyle changes is a micro-mechanism or psychological mechanism for Chinese middle-class groups to construct a self-identity or to win a social identity (Zhou & Qin, 2010b). Considering that the 1949 revolution put an end to the former middle class, the real Chinese middle class is basically the first generation, which is the social darling created by the reform and opening-up over the past few decades (Zhou, 2002). It can be said that the growth history of China’s middle class overlaps with the growth history of contemporary Chinese youth to some extent. This overlap makes the narrative of the growth of Chinese youth, especially young urban intellectuals, strikingly similar to the narrative of the growth of the middle class. In this way, we can also discuss how consumption constructs the self-identity of Chinese young people from the economic and social perspectives, and how it produces their values and lifestyles that are totally different from those of their parents and grandparents. From the perspective of economic factors, the reason why consumption has become the main way for Chinese young people to construct their self-identity is not only that their growth trajectories go hand in hand with the economic development of society over the past 42 years, and the rapid rise of China’s social GDP and a series of market-oriented transformations that have changed the quality of their daily life, but also that the educated young are therefore able to navigate the market economy and increasingly benefit from the reform and opening-up, globalization, and the shift towards markets. We have seen that in the process of continuous GDP growth and market transformation, the income of urban residents continues to increase. At the time of reform and opening-up in 1978, the average annual income of urban non-private enterprise employees was only 615 CNY. Since then, this figure has been increasing: 1,148 CNY in 1985; 2,140 CNY in 1990; 5,500 CNY in 1995; 9,371 CNY in 2000; 18,364 CNY in 2005; and 37,147 CNY in 2010; and 67,569 CNY in 2016 (National Bureau of Statistics). Average incomes almost double or more every five years. As incomes rise, people’s consumption behavior, especially among the younger generation, is encouraged by the state, which varies from time to time. Before 1997, the government adopted a series of policies to improve people’s living standards, such as increasing wages, adjusting the industrial structure, and reducing the annual accumulation rate, in order to reverse the disastrous impact of the Revolution in the Mao Zedong era on people’s lives and to “overcome the crisis of legal resources” (Wang, 2009: 235). After 1997, the country encouraged consumption because the economic crisis in Southeast Asia and the insufficient consumption demand in the domestic market had become the bottleneck restricting the further development of China’s economy. In order to promote its further development, the state explicitly proposed that “we should actively cultivate new consumption hotspots such as housing, so that housing construction truly becomes an important

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industry. We will actively develop services such as telecommunications, tourism, culture, entertainment, health care and sports” (Zhu, 2001: 1174). Thanks to the active advocacy of the state and various policy encouragements, after 2000, the consumption of the Chinese middle class, whose core is the younger, began to upgrade from durable consumer goods such as televisions, washing machines, and refrigerators to more prominent and explicit housing, private cars, and luxury consumer goods. In less than ten years after 2000, housing prices in China have generally increased by one or two times, even several times in coastal areas. When China joined the WTO in 2001, it was the first year when automobiles entered Chinese families. In the ten years after that, the production and sales of domestic sedans continued to achieve double-digit “blowout” growth, from 820,000 in 2001 to 5.32 million in 2007, and then to 18 million in 2010, which was a world first in growth. Moreover, the consumption of houses, cars, and luxury goods has not only become the main consumer markers that the young middle class and their children use to obtain recognition, but has also become the main testing ground for them to change their consumption ideas.9 From the perspective of social factors, the state’s advocacy has not only led the consumption of the Chinese middle class, especially the younger generation, into the fast lane, but more importantly, thanks to the promotion of the state, coupled with the increasingly powerful wave of globalization after the 1990s, the values and lifestyles associated with consumerism began to take shape, especially the powerful and wealthy elites who got rich first and the increasingly large and younger middle class. This is especially important for the identity construction of the middle class, especially the younger generation. As we all know, consumption was the symbol of a bourgeois lifestyle in the propaganda of state ideology during the Mao Zedong era. To some extent, it was synonymous with waste, extravagance, and decadence. After the reform and opening-up, especially after the 1990s, the concept of consumption itself has undergone a “transformation” in mainstream discourse, and even the state has realized the driving role of consumption in the national economy. The market’s natural demand for consumption coincides with the national will, which naturally makes all kinds of advertisements and market behaviors advocating consumption popular. Moreover, as time goes by, China’s advertising demands begin to shift from a functional consumption value to a symbolic consumption value (Chen Sheng, 2003), and the emphasis on the symbolic meaning of commodities has become a sign of consumerism's ascendancy in China (Chen & Huang, 2000). These changes in the public interpretive framework around consumption provide legitimacy for the affluent class, including the middle class, and their children to improve their quality of life and even to distinguish themselves from the grassroots masses through consumption. Take various housing sales advertisements that have been popular in China for more than ten years as an example. The basic appeal theme is often not the comfort of the house itself, but the demonstration and improvement of personal status (Fraser, 2000). In the

24 Social transition sales advertisements of housing in China, “Birds of a feather flock together”, “Buy a new house, be a boss”, “This is the common choice of professors, entrepreneurs and bankers”, and other similar advertising slogans are everywhere, which are unabashedly outspoken about the role that buying a house plays in the construction of a person’s class or social status. Also, the popularity of luxury brands like Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Hermes, Chanel, Rolex, VacheronConstantin, and Rolls-Royce in China reflects the importance of consumption, especially the symbolic consumption, for the young Chinese middle class to obtain self-identity.10 The improvement of Chinese people’s material living conditions, or the transformation of consumption patterns, is of great benefit to the growth of the younger generation. They don’t have to live frugally like their parents or grandparents, eating porridge with pickled vegetables every day, wearing the patchwork clothes of older siblings, sharing a small, dark room with siblings or even parents, or even using the money they would have spent on a Popsicle to buy a pencil. The progress of Chinese society after 1978 has created a material living environment totally different from that of their parents and grandparents. Children, especially those of the urban middle class, live in increasingly rich material conditions from the moment they are born. This not only makes their physical growth and development more robust, but also allows their spiritual or psychological world to grow freely without constraint. It also makes their choice of career and life path more arbitrary, more likely to go beyond the rigid restriction of simply being a “breadwinner”, and to reach the peak experience of human self-realization, as Maslow said, or the free and comprehensive development of the human, as Marx and Engels said. During the interviews, we felt again and again that the younger generation’s ability to feed back culturally was closely related to the great improvement of society’s material living conditions. Take the M family in Guangzhou as an example. GMF was the head of a research institution, and GMM was the financial director of an enterprise. Born in 1984, GMB had his parents’ tall and slim figure, but not the roughness of people from northwest Shanxi province, so he looked more like those elegant and white lads in Guangzhou. Because of his good family, GMB was also very intelligent. He went to key schools all the way, even visiting the United States with his parents when he was only 15 years old. In the words of GMM: Although we had a decent family when we were little, we never dreamed of being like GMB. We often say, “All your wishes come true”, but for the GMB generation, it’s often done without a thought. My neighbors say GMB is very versatile, and he often asked me, “Mom, why can’t you do anything?” I told him that if his father and I had lived like him when we were little, we would have done anything. Don’t you think so? He knows everything in addition to those taught in textbooks: astronomy, geography, history, science, and many others, because he read a lot of books. He can

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get whatever books he wants, while we had nothing but the textbooks when we were young. He is also good at English, not only because he began to learn English in the third grade of primary school, but he has several drawers of tapes and CDs bought for him at home. In 1999, his father GMF had the opportunity to visit the United States, and one of his main considerations for the trip was whether GMB could go to school in the United States. He is in good health and loves playing football and sports. Now we have all kinds of balls in our home. Unlike his father; although he also liked to play basketball when he was young, he either didn’t have the ball or couldn’t find the court. GMB also likes music, and practiced the violin for a period of time when he was a child. Later he thought the violin was not expressive enough, so he changed to the piano. Now, the college entrance examination is coming, but GMB said that the education mode in China is nothing but indoctrination and suppression, which he did not like, so GMF told me that we should respect the child’s wishes and let him go abroad to study. I have no objection. I also know that with the prosperity of our country, this generation of children will really “fly high and far away” in the future as the song says, so I also support him to study abroad. Which parent now does not want to do all he can to satisfy his children’s wishes? Besides, living conditions are good these years, even studying abroad is affordable. In the words of GMF, “Let’s sell a suite for our son to study abroad”. (GMM, 2003) Stories like the GMB family have been heard a lot over the years. Like GMB who later realized his wish to study abroad, more and more Chinese children are now going abroad to go to university or even secondary school. Unlike their parents, who went abroad in the 1980s and 1990s, they do not have to apply for scholarships abroad, wait for state grants, or eat instant noodles with only 20 USD on hand. Often with dozens of dollars in their pockets, they rent comfortable apartments in upscale neighborhoods in London, Boston, New York, Paris, Vancouver, or Sydney, and sometimes their mothers fly in to accompany them. According to statistics, during the 39 years from 1978 to 2017, a total of 5.19 million Chinese students studied abroad, and this number has been growing steadily, reaching 662,100 in 2018, 90% of whom studied abroad at their own expense (China Education News, 2018, 2019). The growing number of selffunded students is some of the clearest evidence of the growing influence of globalization and consumerism in China. And when you understand that reality, you really get a sense that the whole world at least in the eyes of the younger generation has become extremely flat, as Thomas Friedman said. The ten forces that “flatten” the world in the process of globalization—the advent of the era of innovation, the Internet, workflow software, uploading, manufacturing and service outsourcing, offshore business, the global supply chain, express delivery (FedEx and UPS), search services (Google or Yahoo), as well as a variety of digital, mobile, personal, and virtual steroids11—coupled with the rapid growth of GDP and private wealth brought by the reform and opening-up, have really

26 Social transition given our children a completely different perspective and life experience from their parents. The material means they are able to rely on are becoming more and more abundant, which not only changes the image of a poor and weak Chinese society for nearly a century, but also changes the future and destiny of the younger generation, so that Friedman would say to his daughter: I don’t care to have that conversation with my girls, so my advice to them in this flat world is very brief and very blunt: “Girls, when I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ‘Tom, finish your dinner—people in China and India are starving.’ My advice to you is: Girls, finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your jobs.” And in a flat world, they can have them, because in a flat world there is no such thing as an American job. There is just a job, and in more cases than ever before it will go to the best, smartest, most productive, or cheapest worker—wherever he or she resides. (Friedman, 2006: 279) Although we mentioned in Chapter 1 of the first volume of this book that Ronald Inglehart argues that the younger generation that grow up during the boom years will develop a “post-materialistic value system” that focuses more on personal development and spiritual pursuits, in the era of globalization this unique value is likely to spread from developed countries to developing countries (Inglehart, 1997; Wu, 2008; Zheng, 2007), in fact, the improvement of material living conditions does not necessarily lead to a positive life. The rapid growth of GDP may lead to both wasteful consumerism and money worship. In fact, there is a natural connection between consumerism and worship of money.12 It is when consumption becomes the most important activity and the most important value of human beings that people become ever more passionate about money and regard it as the main or even the only purpose of life’s struggle. The prevalence of consumerism certainly requires a material basis, but wealth and material goods do not automatically lead to consumerism. The emergence of consumerism or a consumer society as Baudrillard said is closely related to the following two factors: the mass production and diversification of products resulting from the global spread of the Industrial Revolution, and the emergence of egalitarian democracy also resulting from the Industrial Revolution. The democratic principles advocated by the democratic system are transformed from the real equality, such as the equality of ability, responsibility, social opportunity, and happiness, to a superficial equality and other obvious signs of social achievement and happiness (Baudrillard, 2006: 34). In other words, the Industrial Revolution broke the rigid hierarchical system of feudal society that restricted the possession and consumption of certain goods by ordinary people. And in the micro-technical context, the emergence of consumerism, as Daniel Bell puts it, was aided

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by three social inventions: mass production on an assembly line, which made a cheap automobile possible; the development of marketing, which rationalized the art of identifying different kinds of buying groups and whetting consumer appetites; and the spread of installment buying, which, more than any other social device, broke down the old Protestant fear of debt. (Bell, 1996: 66) In fact, there is one other role that is largely responsible for the prevalence of consumerism in modern society that is absent from this discussion: modern advertising, which is based on sophisticated communication technologies. If you can agree with Daniel Bell that advertising “is the mark of material goods, the exemplar of new styles of life, the herald of new values” (Bell, 1996: 68), then you would agree that advertising is essentially the twin of consumerism and has contributed to the promotion and penetration of consumerist values throughout society. Advertisements not only show the charm of commodities, but also reveal the symbolic meaning of them—in this way, houses and cars are not only places to live or means of transportation, but also symbols of status.13 Advertising not only keenly captures consumers’ social psychology, making them accept its propositions and propaganda through leading words, and by shortening the time interval from preference to action, namely consumption, but it also makes consumers believe that here is their life’s value and hope, and that the advertised lifestyle is the one they want to have. Because of this, advertising has replaced political propaganda as the largest discourse hegemony in modern society. . . . Advertising, together with several other factors—convenience of goods (both for use and access), the manipulation of the society (especially the government and some experts) by businessmen, the psychology of the public to show off and prove themselves by objects, and the unpredictable and never-ending fashion—constitutes the mechanism of producing a consumer society. (Zheng, 2007: 47–48) In the last 100 years, consumerism has become popular in Western society, but it has also been mercilessly criticized and ridiculed by social scientists, including at least the following aspects. First, consumerism advocates naked materialism and hedonism, basing all human needs on the desire, pursuit, possession, and consumption of materials. It is this endless and insatiable pursuit of things that destroys the Protestant ethic on which modern capitalism depends for survival and development, and makes today’s world an arena full of materialistic desires. There is no doubt that consumerism and its promotion of materialism and hedonism is one of the inherent characteristics of capitalist culture. In his article “Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus”, Max Weber emphasizes that Calvinism—thrift and the legal pursuit of wealth—are the basic principles that promote the rise of Western

28 Social transition civilization characterized by rational production and exchange (Weber, 2005); however, capitalism, as Bell says, has a double origin: It is based both on the “asceticism” that Weber emphasizes and the “acquisitiveness” that Werner Sombart discussed in The Jews and Modern Capitalism (Bell, 1996: xviii), which constitute the irreconcilable cultural contradictions of capitalism. If the former’s emphasis on hard work, thrift, and moderation promoted the development of early capitalism, the latter’s emphasis on consumption fostered hedonism, which became the intrinsic driving force of late capitalism or what Bell called “the new capitalism”. In this new capitalist or consumer society, consumption takes the place of production, and the order of production is maintained by massive consumption or constant waste. In the abundance of things and the endless consumption of things, “just as the wolf-child became a wolf by living among wolves, so we too are slowly becoming functional” (Baudrillard, 1998: 25). Second, consumerism holds that people do not consume for their own survival and development, and the real valuable purpose of consumption is to pursue the symbolic meaning of goods, which is the symbol of social evaluation. In other words, in a consumer society, consumption is a dynamic carrier that shows a person’s wealth, status, class, identity, taste, and even personality characteristics. The level of consumption reflects the level of a person’s social status and value realization. In Baudrillard’s words, “in order to become object of consumption, the object must become sign”, because “it is never consumed in its materiality, but in its difference” (Baudrillard, 1988: 22). Just because people’s consumption objects have symbolic significance, they will naturally show or show off their wealth, status, or taste through their consumption items. As early as 1899, the American sociologist Veblen noted that, for tycoons who are created by a culture of money but have no benefit for the purpose of collective living, since consumption, especially the conspicuous consumption, is a proof of wealth and then ability or honor, “conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure” (Veblen, 1967: 47). Since the advent of the consumer society in the 20th century, the new middle class with its other-directed personality began to form “an ‘abundance psychology’ capable of ‘wasteful’ luxury consumption of leisure and of the surplus product” (Riesman et al., 2001: 18). At the same time, the inherent “status panic” caused more and more middle-class men and women to compete for consumption and put more effort into acquiring prestige symbols (Mills, 1979: 254). Third, consumerism advocates that consumption is the ultimate goal of life; in other words, the value and significance of people’s existence is reflected in what you can possess or consume and how much you can possess or consume, while labor and creation are just ways or means for us to obtain consumption materials. Under the guidance of such consumption values, people will naturally translate Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” into “I consume, therefore I am”, advocated by consumer society; hence consumption has become a realistic way for people to obtain self-identity. Under the guidance of such values, it is natural to see the phenomenon that Marx ridiculed in his day: What people always thought they couldn’t sell is now exchanged and bought. Even virtues, love,

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faith, knowledge and conscience are finally bought and sold. It is a time of widespread bribery, widespread buying and selling, or, to use the term of political economy, it is the period when everything spiritual or material becomes exchange value and goes to the market to find the evaluation that best matches its true value (Marx & Engels, 1973: 79–80). Unfortunately, these 100 years of economic and social development have not reversed the commodity fetishism that Marx attacked; on the contrary, with the rapid growth of GDP in the whole world, shopping and consumption have become the highest principles of the consumption society and of the trend of global spread. If China’s development is nearly a century later than that of the developed countries in the world, then in the decades after the reform and opening-up, when the growth of GDP made “some people get rich first” in the Chinese population, all the phenomena criticized and ridiculed by the above-mentioned thinkers were also prevalent in China. It is said that in China, a country with a per capita GDP of just over 4,000 USD and ranking more than 90 in the world, the consumption of luxury goods in 2009 has surpassed that of the United States, becoming the world’s second largest luxury goods market after Japan. In 2018, Chinese people spent 770 billion CNY on luxury goods both at home and abroad, accounting for one third of the global total (McKinsey & Company, 2019). But consumerism in China is more problematic than that. If we say that the background of consumerism in Western society is homogeneous, that consumers as the main body of consumption are basically the same, and that there is no obvious group differentiation phenomenon in the consumption of the whole society, then the operational background of consumerism in China is extremely complex, facing the problem of consumption class differentiation and urban–rural division. As far as the former is concerned, the consumerism in Chinese society is mainly supported by a few high-income groups. The globalization expansion of multinational companies occupies the consumption capacity of these people and transfers the market of China, a developing country, from the internal state of the nation to a part of the world market (Chen et al., 2009). In the case of the latter, in the more populous rural areas, where food and clothing are mostly available, there is little prospect of further consumer satisfaction. This has not only led to the rise of the “knock-off products” characterized by piracy, cloning, and imitation, but also often trapped the Chinese economy in the dilemma of rampant consumerism on the one hand and insufficient domestic demand on the other (Duan, 2009). Therefore, while we sing the praises of the social prosperity and affluence brought by a growth of GDP, we have to reflect on and guard against the spread of consumerism. It should be acknowledged that in general, from the perspective of intergenerational differences, the older generation is the adherent of the traditional consumption ethics of thrift and diligence, while the younger generation is the advocate and spokesman of consumerism. The younger generation in question is relative to the older generation, and may include the under-50s. Of these three generations, those born or brought up after the reform and opening-up, the

30 Social transition post-70s, post-80s, and post-90s generations, needless to say, have grown up with the increase and accumulation of wealth. Although the 45–60-year-old generation experienced the extreme material shortage of the Mao Zedong era, some of them, the so-called middle class, are also the beneficiaries of this new era, the actual owners of wealth. This contradictory historical experience has given them a dual attitude towards material comforts and consumption. On the one hand, they feel that their children do not cherish money enough or understand hard-won happiness; on the other hand, they are vainer than their children, and their consumption may be more ostentatious.14 In the interview, 11-year-old SKG and 22-year-old SMG complained about the excessive consumption desire of their mother. SKG even said it bluntly, “I think the reason why my mother is ‘greedy’ is she was frightened by her past poverty” (SKG, 2014). Thus, I believe that it may be impossible to form what Inglehart called “post-materialism” (Inglehart, 1997), or to enter what Zheng Yefu called a “post-materialistic era” (Zheng, 2007) in our generation. But the younger generation, who grew up in a truly affluent environment, is very likely to take a hard look at the meaning of consumption and, as Madsen put it, resist some of the negative effects of the consumption revolution in a more systematic way (Madsen, 2000: 318). Given that both SHG and SNG know how to arrange their parents’ self-guided trips in Europe or the United States for minimal cost, and that SNG has taught parents how to shop online for inexpensive groceries—in the words of SNF, the largest online shopping experience has included a Simmons mattress (SNF, 2014)—this is not a wild guess. If so, it may be safe to say that there will not be a whole new cultural reverse movement about consumption and even the meaning of life in China in the future.

Intergenerational tilt, or the descending of the family orthocenter If the rapid changes brought by social transformation and globalization are only the macro-background of the changes in the intergenerational relationship and the phenomenon of cultural reverse in Chinese society, then the changes within the families in this society triggered by this great change are the microenvironment. In Chapter 2 of the first volume of this book, we discussed the traditional family system in Chinese society and the family ethics principle with its tradition of filial piety and seniority at the core. In his research on the Chinese family system, Fei Xiaotong quoted the British anthropologist Raymond Firth as saying: The triangle on stage or screen is the love conflict between two men and a woman (and more recently, two women and a man); but from the anthropologist’s point of view, the real triangle in the social structure is the sons and daughters and their parents united by a common sentiment. (Firth, 2009)

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Fei Xiaotong went on to write: The meaning of marriage lies in the establishment of the basic triangle in the social structure. A couple is not just a sexual relationship between a man and a woman, but a responsible partnership. In the contract of marriage two connected social relations are formed at the same time—husband–wife and parent–child. These two kinds of relations cannot be independent, as the relationship between the couple takes the parent–child relationship as the premise, and the parent–child relationship also takes the husband–wife relationship as the necessary condition. It is the three sides of a triangle and any side is indispensable . (Fei, 1998: 159) Fei realized that although the husband–wife relationship and the parent–child relationship are interdependent, it is clear that in traditional Chinese society, the parent–child relationship is more important than the relationship between husband and wife and is the focus of the family structure. But the parent–child relationship is not always sentimental. As children grow up, parents are responsible for transforming a biological person into a social one, and have to impose social norms on their children with some force, so that “it is no more difficult for people to live under the most despotic monarch than it is for a child to live under the parents who love him most” (Fei, 1998: 191). The difficulty of living under the parents is that they often hand over their unfinished “ideal” to their children, while they themselves face the “reality” and muddle through. But this is only a mild dislocation at a time when social change is painfully slow. In modern times, with the acceleration of social changes, the ideal itself has become an uncertain thing, or the ideal of the parents may become “rubbish” in the eyes of children. “The judgment of the previous generation is hardly suitable for the new environment of the second generation” (Fei, 1998: 155), so the imposition of this “rubbish” cannot but cause the tension of intergenerational relations, thus “the phenomenon of ‘father not father, son not son’ will occur” (Fei, 1998: 76). The phenomenon of generational changes caused by social changes discussed by Fei Xiaotong became more obvious in China after 1978, when the family relationship in Chinese society shows a trend of intergenerational tilt or downward center of gravity (Liu, 2005). In other words, the importance of the younger generation in the parent–child relationship begins to increase. Although Schurmann argued that paternalism had fallen apart after the 1949 revolution (Schurmann, 1971: 7), and Stacey gently suggested that the so-called democratic patriarchy and patriarchal socialism had emerged in the Chinese family (Stacey, 1983), in fact “communism has not completely dismantled patriarchy” (Shen, 2009). The real factors leading to the collapse of patriarchy are the large-scale urbanization and marketization brought by the reform and openingup and the family planning policy implemented in the 1980s. It is this series of continuous changes in social life that leads to the decline of patriarchy (Jin,

32 Social transition 2000; Yan, 2006) and also leads to the inversion of the traditional parent–child relationship and the increase of the status and importance of the younger generation. Specifically, the above-mentioned intergenerational tilt phenomenon is related to the following three changes. First, the intergenerational tilt or downward shift in family relations in Chinese society is related to the large-scale urbanization since the 1980s and the increase of social mobility associated with urbanization. As we all know, in the 30 years before the reform and opening-up, China’s economy also made considerable progress, with an average annual growth rate of 6.1%. However, because of the “anti-urbanization” strategy adopted in the large-scale industrialization process (Murphey, 1980; Zhou, 2010), while highlighting the production function of cities and inhibiting their consumption and cultural functions, the urbanization rate in China has been below the average annual rate of 0.6%. At the beginning of the reform and opening-up, the urbanization rate was only 17.92%, which is far behind that of industrialization.15 After the reform and opening-up, especially after 1996, China’s urbanization made considerable progress, according to the sixth census, reaching 49.68% (Ma, 2011); that is to say, the average annual growth rate of urbanization in the 32 years after the reform and opening-up was 0.99%, while in the five years from 2005 to 2010 it was as high as 1.376% (by the end of 2019, China’s urbanization rate had reached 60.60%). The significant changes brought about by the growth of the urban population, coupled with the impact of the one-child policy, which we will discuss later, led to the development of small and core families. The average size of each family is only 3.1 people, that is to say, the current Chinese family is mainly composed of an adult couple and their minor children. These new changes naturally place the child at the center of the family in what we call an intergenerational tilt or the descending of the family orthocenter. Associated with urbanization, the increase of China’s floating population also further promotes the miniaturization and centralization of family structure. Since the reform and opening-up, the mobility rate of the population has been increasing, and now it has reached 260 million people, among whom the majority are migrant workers (Ma, 2011). Jin Yihong confirms that this “de-regionalized” flow in terms of geographical boundaries and old relationships “greatly weakens the control ability of fathers over individuals, especially the younger generation” (Jin, 2010; Pan, 2007; Zhu, 2008). Thus, while the younger generation of minors has become the center of the family, the younger generation of adults has become more autonomous than ever before. For example, many studies on “working girls” have found that migrant work or employment mobility have formed an unprecedented impact on the traditional patriarchal family system. In terms of migration, work choice, love, marriage, birth, and social communication, female migrant workers have shown a challenge to their parents’ authority (Tan, 2004). “No longer the master of the young” has also become a common lament of the parents’ generation, including in our interviews. Second, the intergenerational tilt or the descending of the family orthocenter in family relations in Chinese society is related to the change of marketization and various economic orders and distribution patterns associated with it. As we

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know, before 1978, the state-dominated redistribution system in Chinese society was based on people’s social status (including political and professional status) and seniority in the system. In such a distributive system, the weakness of young people was not only reflected in their income, but also in the welfare system such as housing and health care, which made them rely on the older generation. However, as we discussed in Chapter 1 of the first volume of this book, after the reform and opening-up, the transformation of Chinese society towards marketization made the economic return of human capital become clear at least in the intergenerational field. This phenomenon of marketization leading to higher economic status of children, thus reducing the power of fathers over families, is now common in both urban and rural families. In urban families, as Liu Jingming’s research confirms, the employment opportunities and levels of children with higher education have been much higher than those of their parents, let alone their grandparents (Liu, 2006a), while the growth of economic income has improved their intergenerational status in the family. In rural families, young people’s income from migrant work is far greater than that from their parents’ or grandparents’ farming, which also accelerates the transfer of family economic power from the old to the young (Jin, 2010). Given that the younger generation often have an innate understanding of the market economy and its rules, like the BV families in Zhejiang village mentioned in Chapter 3 of the first volume of this book, this accelerates the intergenerational succession of many families—decision-making power in family matters is clearly beginning to tilt downward: the parents are not yet old physically, but the children have taken over spiritually. When we came to Beijing in 1993, BVB was only 16 years old. Of course, it was me and her mother who started the clothing business and he helped us. But it wasn’t long before I realized that he had more brains than we did. Because BVB had contacts with Beijing young people nearby, unlike us who only associated with Wenzhou people, he spoke Beijing dialect well and had many more sources. For example, two years earlier, the government often rectified the “Zhejiang village”, but because we knew few local people and had little information, we didn’t know when to close up to “shun trouble”, and often suffered losses. Then he told us when to close up. For another example, he often brought back some popular clothing styles. At first, I could not accept some of them, but tried to make some and sold well. Gradually, I simply let him decide. (BVF, 1995) Third, the intergenerational tilt or the descending of the family orthocenter is also related to the impact and transformation of family form and parenting concept brought about by the implementation of family planning and the one-child policy since the 1980s. In the 1970s, China began to promote family planning. In 1980, it further implemented the one-child policy, which not only led to the decline of China’s family fertility rate and population growth rate, but also

34 Social transition created a special generation—the only children, and a new group of social cells, the one-child families (Wu, 2008: 263). Feng Xiaotian’s research found that the “family of three”, consisting of a couple and one child, has a different lifestyle from the previous extended family, among which the most important are: the living pattern in which the young live apart from their elders, yet take care of each other; the shift of the family center from fathers to children; and the increasing equality of the parent–child relationship (Feng, 1994). The shift of the family center from parents to children is determined by the importance of the only child in a family. It is obvious that one child will inevitably be the focus of the parents’ attention and emotional concentration. Family emotions, consumption, education, leisure, and communication will all focus on this child. The equality of the parent–child relationship is also determined by the importance of the only child in a family. Since there is only one child, parents will naturally make concessions to their children when encountering problems. The frequent social communication and interaction between parents and children makes parents become “collaborators and big partners” of children on many occasions, forming relatively equal communication relations—games, for example, are more likely to take place in only-child households. Also, the pattern of only children living apart from their parents, with the two generations looking after each other, can not only achieve intergenerational care of grandchildren, but also meet the emotional adhesion between grandparents and grandchildren. The phenomenon of family members two generations apart being closer to each other in traditional Chinese society is often most fully expressed in the one-child families—because there is only one child, grandparents can put all their heart and soul into this child and realize their emotional attachment through taking care of him. In fact, the older generation often tolerates, appreciates, and even connives at the challenge of their grandchildren unlike the same kind of behavior in their children. The short essay “Go home and ask my grandson” written by the late Mr. Fan Jingyi, the famous newspaper man we mentioned in Chapter 1 of the first volume of this book, expresses this special emotion vividly. Recently, I often have meetings with my old comrades to discuss some new fields, subjects and knowledge, like the knowledge economy, intellectual property, the information superhighway, the use and management of computer software. Sometimes when faced with difficulties, some old comrades will naturally say “wait until I go home to ask my son” or “wait until I go home to ask my grandson”. At first I was not used to hearing these words: After a lifetime of being an intellectual, even an intellectual of some fame, how can one even “go home and ask his grandson”? Later, when I thought more about it, I suddenly felt that this is not a disorder, but a reflection of the historical change we are experiencing. “Go home and ask my grandson” first shows that science and technology are developing rapidly in today’s world, and our knowledge is increasingly

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falling behind the wheel of the times. Our children and grandchildren are, or have been, far ahead of us. If you think about it, the science and technology we learned in elementary school, middle school and college is much naiver and superficial than what today’s teenagers learn. Today, in many families, it is the case that a grandfather or a father is far less skilled at using a computer than a child who is still in elementary school. This is the progress of the society. “Go home and ask my grandson” also illustrates a change in social attitudes. In the past, old people used to scold their children and grandchildren with such words as, “what do you know?” or “I have walked over more bridges than you have!” Now it is rare to hear such old-fashioned words, which are gradually replaced by “asking questions”. This is because old people have admitted that their knowledge of modern science and technology is behind the times, so they are eager to catch up, and no longer consider it a loss of face to ask younger people. This is also the progress of the times. In fact, even in western countries with highly developed science and technology, it is normal to “go home and ask my grandson”. It is said that because of the rapid development of science and technology, judges often encounter professional knowledge that they do not know. Under such circumstances, judges often have to announce a temporary adjournment to consult experts or ask their sons or grandchildren. This is what a legal problem expert told me, so I think it can not be false. This, of course, is not to disparage the elderly. The old have their merits and have much valuable experience for the young to learn. I just want to emphasize that in the face of ever-changing science and technology, the urgency of knowledge renewal is becoming more and more prominent for the old generation. This has become a worldwide issue. In the United States, some old doctors in their 50s and 60s have gone to study for new doctorates in order to rearm themselves. Therefore, in order to better keep up with the pace of the times, we must study hard and humbly, including learning from our second and third generations; otherwise, even if we want to “let ourselves play our part”, the surplus value is increasingly limited. In this sense, the willingness to “go home and ask my grandchildren” is a good phenomenon worthy of praise, which is much more positive and valuable than constantly lamenting the “declining generations” or “feeling sorry for the current situation”. (Fan, 1998) In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in 2003, I also said, “Parents used to obey the old order, and now they listen to their children” (Chang, 2003). The intergenerational relationship involved is not just between grandparents and parents living today, but between fathers and grandchildren, as well as grandparents and grandchildren. In other words, it has become one of the regular sights of our time that the older generation is beginning to listen to the younger generation.

36 Social transition No matter whether it is globalization, social transformation, or the intergenerational inclination brought about by the change of the family structure, in a word, all the forces of social change are working together to change the intergenerational relationship that has lasted for thousands of years in Chinese society. For it was the great changes that began in the second half of the 20th century that created the great rift in Chinese society that we have repeatedly highlighted between generations. In the following Chapters 2 and 3, we will also discuss the influence of the peer group of young people known as the “knowledge reservoir” or “extended memory” and the broader mass media on the intergenerational relationship of Chinese society, especially the phenomenon of “cultural reverse” we are talking about here. We will further confirm to our readers that the subversive revolution in intergenerational relations has also benefited from the interaction between young people, from the wave of information and knowledge brought by the media, and that cultural reverse is one of the most valuable life experiences brought to us by the intergenerational revolution.

Notes 1 Giambattista Vico tried to divide human history in the way of the ancient Egyptians into three ages: the age of gods, the age of heroes, and the age of mortals; Ferguson divided the development of society into three stages: primitive society, savage society, and refined society; Saint-Simon, on the other hand, believed that these three stages were the theological stage, the metaphysical stage, and the empirical stage (Zhou, 2002: 11–15). 2 Although we do not generally consider Marx’s concept of development to be a linear evolutionary theory, in Das Kapital Marx did say that the more developed industrial countries showed the less developed industrial countries only a vision of the future of the latter (Marx & Engels, 1973: 8). The five-stage theory of human social development, which was later widely spread in China, came from Stalin’s On Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism (1938). In this work, Stalin clearly proposed the single-line development scheme of five modes of production from a primitive commune system, to slavery, a feudal system, capitalism, and socialism (Stalin, 1962: 199). 3 To some extent, the theory of modernization was born out of the McCarthyism of the Cold War era of the 1950s, and thus naturally had an ideological tendency to justify America’s post-war international policy (Peck, 1969), or to become what Michael E. Latham called the “non-communist manifesto” (Latham, 2003). Therefore, as Webster said, the fiercest criticism of the modernization theory is to accuse it of completely ignoring the influence of colonialism and imperialism on the third world countries (Webster, 1984: 37). 4 Although generally speaking, the artistic life of Nanjing, the “abandoned capital”, is far less colorful than that of Beijing and Shanghai, it is only because of its historical association with the national government that the Chinese on the island of Taiwan have a special attachment to it. Taking Lai’s plays as an example, Nanjing seems to have been his main experimental theater on the mainland. Thanks to my friend, Miss Zheng Sihua, who is the promoter of Lai Shengchuan’s drama in the Nanjing area, I also had the honor to watch two other dramas directed by Lai in recent years: Peach Blossom Land and Love on a Two Way Street. 5 As China’s middle class grows rapidly, so does its wealthy or economic elite. According to statistics, by the end of 2008, there were just 1.6 million wealthy

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8

9

10

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households in China, but that number is now growing at 16% a year. According to a 2009 report by McKinsey & Company, China will be the world’s fourth richest country after the United States, Japan, and the United Kingdom. In 2018, excluding Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, the number of “wealthy families” on the Chinese mainland with assets of 6 million CNY reached 3.87 million, 250,000 more than the previous year or 7% growth, ranking third in the world after the United States and Japan (Global Consulting Group, 2018). I have discussed, using the views of Hungarian sociologists such as Szelenyi, the curious mixture of Communist Party, socialism, capitalists (now collectively referred to as “private entrepreneurs”), and capitalism in a rapidly developing socialist market economy. “In the sense of the market, China can be figuratively described as ‘having both capitalists and capitalism’ in contrast to Russia’s ‘having capitalists without capitalism’ and central Europe’s ‘having capitalism without capitalists’.” And, of course, the consistent leadership of the Communist Party (Zhou & Chen, 2010b). By the end of 2013 when I revised this chapter, the operating mileage of China’s high-speed railway had reached 11,028 kilometers, accounting for half of the world’s total mileage, and another 4,883 kilometers were under construction. It is reported that in 2009, students from Shanghai, China, ranked first in the Organisation for International Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)’s assessment of the reading ability of 15-year-olds in 65 countries and regions, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Brazil, Hong Kong, and China. Shanghai scored 556, followed by South Korea (539), Finland (536), and Hong Kong (533) (Xinhua News Agency, 2010b). It also shows that the academic performance of Chinese children has improved remarkably compared with that of their parents. Anyone who has read Walters’s New Traditionalism in Communist Society knows that the author uses the concept of “new traditionalism” to show that the old traditions before 1949 did not die, but continued in various ways in the state, society, and factory system of new China. For example, the decision-makers of the state and the Party originally wanted to set up a set of impersonal and somewhat universalist “system of political incentives” aimed at motivating political beliefs and moral values in state-owned factories, but in specific factory practice, the leader of the unit as an agent starts from the pursuit of self-interest and transforms it into a personalized reward system aiming at encouraging workers and leaders to establish a long-term and close cooperative relationship. In this way, the original incentive system is changed and become a “principled particularism”. For example, in 2002, China’s housing loan balance accounted for less than 2% of the total loan balance of financial institutions, but only one year later, in 2003, China’s housing loan balance had risen to 1.2 trillion RMB, accounting for 10% of the total loan balance of financial institutions. According to the latest statistics, China’s outstanding housing loans reached 25.8 trillion CNY in 2018. During a visit to Paris in November 2008, I visited the Lafayette department store at 40 Rue Haussmann, next to the Paris Opera House. As soon as I walked out of the subway and into the shopping lobby, I thought I was back in China, because there were so many Chinese people everywhere, and there were signs on all the counters that said, “We offer Chinese service”. I went up to the second floor and saw dozens of Chinese people lined up at the Louis Vuitton store, where bags were sold. As soon as I appeared, a man in his 40s, already carrying three Louis Vuitton bags, rushed up to me and asked me if I wanted to buy bags. After knowing that I wasn’t going to buy one, he asked me if I could give him my passport, because in France, only one Louis Vuitton bag could be bought per passport. When I asked him why he bought so many Louis Vuitton bags, the man replied, “Only 500 euros for a Louis Vuitton bag! It’s so cheap!” (Zhou, 2008a).

38 Social transition 11 Friedman calls some of the new technologies “steroids,” in his words, mainly because they amplify the effects of all the other flattening forces. Specifically, it is done in a variety of digital, mobile, virtual, and personal ways, which in turn flattens the world (Friedman, 2006: 145). 12 We used to criticize capitalism as pure money worship, but it is money worship in Chinese society that is truly jaw-dropping. According to a survey of 23 countries released by Ipsos in 2010, 69% of Chinese people agreed that “money is the best symbol of personal success”, higher than the average of 57%. Close to China was South Korea, followed by India and Japan, while the U.S., which we have long regarded as a symbol of money worship, was only 33%. Ipsos thus concluded that: (a) easterners value money more than westerners; (b) people in transition countries value money more than those in developed countries, and China combines these two factors (Ipsos, 2010). 13 Interestingly, not only did I study advertising, but I also ran an organization called the Jiuge Advertising Company from 1995 to 1998, which didn’t close until I went to Harvard University in the United States in early 1999 to do research. Although it has been a long time since I left advertising, I still remember the famous words of Claude Hopkins, an American advertising man, who said that advertising is to commodities what drama is to life (Zhou, 1994b: 1). No matter how negative advertising is to modern society, you must admit that it is advertising that makes the modern promotion of goods so wonderful. 14 When I visited Canada in the summer of 2010, on a cruise ship from Vancouver to British Columbia, I ran into more than 200 summer tour groups of high school students from Wenzhou, China. The middle-class children, bright and confident, all attended the top local high schools and had excellent interpersonal skills. They told me it cost almost everyone more than 100,000 RMB to come out once. I was surprised why they spent so much money. They replied that in addition to their own expenses, which would cost 40,000 to 50,000 RMB, they would also buy all kinds of expensive luxuries for their parents, especially their mothers. In their words: “Who doesn’t have a shopping order from mom?” I asked for a copy of the shopping list, which covered everything from watches and handbags to cosmetics and clothes. 15 Under Preston’s law, for every 1% increase in the industrial share of the workforce, the urban share grows by 2%, but in fact, not only did China’s urbanization lag behind the industrialization in the 30 years before the reform and opening-up, but even after, urbanization still lags behind Preston’s law. For example, during the period of reform and opening-up from 1978 to 2000, the proportion of industrial workers in the total workforce increased by 28.2%, while the proportion of the urban population increased by only 18.3% (Li, 2005b).

2

The peer group as knowledge reservoir and extended memory

The parents in the era dominated by other-direction lose their once undisputed role; the old man is no longer “the governor”—and the installer of governors. Other adult authorities such as the governess and grandmother either almost disappear or, like the teacher, take on the new role of peer-group facilitator and mediator—a role not too different perhaps from that of many clergymen who, in the adult congregation, move from morality to morale . . . It will be possible to put him into school and playground, and camp in the summer, with other children of virtually the same age and social position. If the adults are the judge, these peers are the jury. And, as in America the judge is hemmed in by rules which give the jury a power it has in no other common-law land, so the American peer group, too, cannot be matched for power throughout the middle-class world. David Riesman et al., 1961

The peer group and generational identity Just as the wheels of the second half of the 20th century were beginning to slide into history, David Riesman, one of the best-known postwar American sociologists, in The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing Character of the American People, was quick to note that with the increasingly rapid changes of modern society, the elders who used to occupy the supreme position in the socialization of teenagers begin to lose their supreme influence and give way to increasingly colorful and diverse peer groups. For this reason, Riesman points out that to explain personality changes in modern society, it is necessary to emphasize “the role of the peer group and the school in adolescence in the formation of character”, although “perhaps itself underestimates the possibility of change as the result of the experiences of adulthood” (Riesman et al., 2001: xxxvii). In Riesman’s analysis framework, the “S-curve”, which represents the changing trend of population growth, is regarded as an indicator of social change. The horizontal line at the bottom of the S-curve indicates that the population is not increasing, or is increasing very slowly, when the birth and death rates are very high; since a population explosion can be achieved simply by reducing mortality, Riesman calls this the incubation period for rapid growth. Then, as the West entered industrial society, the population began to increase rapidly DOI: 10.4324/9781003024309-2

40 The peer group because of increased grain production, improved sanitary conditions, and improved measures to prevent and control diseases. The middle section of the S-curve shows this upward trend, which is demographically called the transitional growth period. Finally, after World War II, with the transition of the United States from the era of production to the era of consumption, the decline of the birth rate, and the already reduced death rate, the population change began to enter the flat or even declining section at the top of the S-curve: society entered the so-called initial period of population decline. Riesman’s interest lies not in explaining the simple population growth and its trend in modern times, but in the influence of social changes on people’s personality changes. In this sociologist’s eyes, “each of these three different phases on the population curve appears to be occupied by a society that enforces conformity and molds social character in a definably different way” (Riesman et al., 2001: 8). To be specific, when society is in the farming stage, in the “incubation period of rapid growth” of population mentioned by Riesman, because of the slow social change, people’s behavior patterns are subject to the influence of tradition formed over hundreds of years or even thousands of years. Society basically relies on tradition to achieve its members’ compliance. In the 17th century, or after the Industrial Revolution, society entered the transitional growth period of population. The so-called “modern factors” of population mobility, technological innovation, rapid accumulation of capital, sustained commodity production, and colonial and imperialist expansion gave people greater choice and freedom, and they were no longer constrained by a traditional orientation, and society begins to rely on an “inner direction” or self-orientation for its members to comply with it. Finally, in the post-industrial era, with its emphasis on production and consumption, society began to enter an “initial period of population decline”, when fewer and fewer people were engaged in agricultural production or raw material industry and manufacturing, and the working hours were beginning to shorten. In addition to material comforts, people had leisure. In these new conditions, the hardy and enterprising spirit of internally oriented persons became superfluous. Others, rather than circumstances, became the problem (Riesman et al., 2001: 18). At this point, society began to rely on the “other direction” to ensure that its members complied with it. In Riesman et al.’s argument, others, beyond tradition and self, gradually become decisive factors affecting people’s behavior. The most important modern component of this “other” for the younger generation is the peer group, “an informal group composed of people with similar status, age, interests, hobbies, values and behaviors” (Zhou, 1997: 136). Here, although age is a key variable, the influence of socioeconomic status, race, and gender differences cannot be ignored (Ennett & Bauman, 1996). Many sociological studies have confirmed that peer groups are increasingly influencing individual socialization in modern society: Not only do American and European high school students spend twice as much time per week with their peers as with their parents or other adults (Bronfenbrenner, 1970; Larson & Verma, 1999), but American teenagers report better moods when they are together with their peers (Larson, 1983). Similarly,

The peer group 41 Chinese children are more likely to tell their peers what’s on their minds, and even among Chinese students, the peer group is fairly homogeneous in terms of academic achievement (Chen, et al., 2003). It was Theodore Newcomb, an American social psychologist, who first sensed and empirically studied the influence of peer groups. Newcomb spent several years from 1939 investigating the relationship between women’s college experience and sociopolitical attitudes at Bennington Women’s College in the United States. In LeVine’s words, interaction with peer groups at this progressive university in Vermont changes the political and economic attitudes of female college students from conservative families (LeVine, 1966: 114). Specifically, Newcomb found that young students who had strong ties to conservative families tended to be more conservative when they entered college, but the college experience of interacting in peer groups over the following few years liberalized them in their political leanings and personal life styles (Newcomb, 1943: 274). Newcomb’s work was not only the first to confirm the power of peer groups, but also provides practical support for the “reference group” theory proposed by the sociologist H. Hyman (1942). Although Newcomb’s genius led to the Bennington study later becoming a diverse guide to the hypothesis of peer group influence (LeVine, 1966: 122), the study itself is only one of the symbols of the rise of youth culture in the United States in the 1940s. There are many other events that also serve as symbols, but some of the most important are the following. First, American sociologist Talcott Parsons put forward the concept of “youth culture” for the first time in his article “Age and sex in the social structure of the United States” (Parsons, 1942), which later became the starting point for a series of studies and discussions on youth (Berger, 1972: 176). Second, the more popular concept of “teenage” or “teenager” is based on the term “adolescence” originally coined by the psychologist Stanley Hall. The shift from “adolescence” to “teenager” not only confirms Hall’s prediction that there is a clear disconnect between childhood and adulthood, but more importantly, this period is no longer regarded as one of unrest and rebellion, but a period of consumption more acceptable to modern society. Third, in September 1944, a young fashion magazine called Seventeen was released for the first time. It inspired the “purest manifestations of American youth’s desire for novelty, excitement, and self-identification”, and “pulled together the strands of democracy, national identity, peer culture, target marketing, and youth consumerism into an irresistible package” (Savage, 2007: 450). Finally, around the time of Seventeen, a singer named Frank Sinatra became an icon for young people, especially young women, on Broadway in New York City. In addition to the thousands of girls at the Paramount Theater who attended five shows from dawn to dusk, Times Square outside was packed with tens of thousands of crazy girls who couldn’t get tickets. Sinatra’s voice was accompanied by their stomping, shouting, clapping, and screaming, and a rain of roses, underpants, and bras. This is “a phenomenon of mass hysteria that is only seen two or three times in a century” (Savage, 2007: 442).

42 The peer group Although the sentimentality of Seventeen and the commotion inside and outside the Paramount Theater gave Parsons, an old-school and somewhat conservative scholar, reason to think that American youth culture was more or less irresponsible (Parsons, 1942), his concept of this culture confirmed a new fact: Because of the needs of war and industry, “American adolescents had succeeded in creating a world quite distinct from both adults and children” (Savage, 2007: 453). There is no need to explain the fact that industry and consumption were dependent on teenagers, but it is curious that war put teenagers onto the history stage: Because the 18–30 age group was among the 7 million applicants, the remaining teenagers played a bigger role in daily life and the public sphere. After the end of World War II, with the promotion of industrialization, especially post-industrialization, teenagers, peer groups, and youth culture began to spread all over the world (Larson & Wilson, 2004). Since then, as Eisenstadt puts it, almost all modern social development and social movements in developed countries such as the United States and Europe had their origins in diverse youth groups, peer groups, and youth movements, and what was called youth culture (Eisenstadt, 1972: 10). China’s youth culture in a completely independent sense emerged in the reform and opening-up era in 1978, and was shaped by the increasingly powerful market forces emphasizing consumption after 1992. But, as we have already described in Chapter 2 of the first volume of this book, the rampage of the Red Guard movement and the subsequent movement of intellectual youth into the countryside began, in Chinese fashion, to lay the foundations for the subsequent youth culture based around peer groups. Although both movements affecting tens of millions of people were manipulated and controlled by the Great Leader, the “rebellious” experience of defeating all the “feudalist, capitalist and revisionist” authorities all composed of elders, and the “honing” of leaving their parents and families and going to the countryside, made the power of the peer group more or less reflected in this generation of young people. Whether it is the Red Guard movement or the “movement to go to the countryside”, some embryonic forms of peer groups and even youth subculture can be revealed, which we can discuss in at least two ways. First, in these two movements, a group of peers with distinct characteristics of intergenerational identity had been formed around the two iconic titles of the Red Guard or “educated youth”. Whoever participated in the “chains” of the Red Guards, or had been to the countryside as educated youth, can clearly remember that, in the “chains” or countryside, no matter where you went, no matter whether you knew each other or not, as long as you reported that you were a Red Guard or an educated youth then other Red Guards or educated youth of the same age as you would put the rice bowl into your hand, or would give you their own bed to sleep in.1 In the later stage of the movement, “all educated youth considered themselves to be part of the same group”, and even farm youth, people married to local farmers, or non-agricultural workers required the administrative departments to identify them as “educated youth” (Bonnin, 2004: 380).

The peer group 43 Second, in these two movements, the embryonic form of the youth subculture was formed, and the most distinctive sign was the emergence of “underground literature” and “educated youth literature”, which are inextricably linked: Not only did the hostess of the earliest “underground art salon”, such as Li Li and Xu Haoyuan, experience the transformation from Red Guard to educated youth, but the authors of the novels Ruin and Escape and the three core figures of the Baiyangdian School of Poetry, Mang Ke, Yue Zhong, and Duo Duo, were all educated youth (Yang, 1993).2 In addition to poems and novels, many “songs of the educated youth”, including the “The song of the educated youth in Nanjing”,3 constituted the main theme of the youth subculture in that special age. Although the culture of educated youth did not have the general “counterculture” characteristics at this time, it did start to think independently and, as Pan Mingxiao said, gained its own expressive space in the countryside where social control was relatively weak (Bonnin, 2004: 344). Compared with their parents, who used to be Red Guards and educated youth, the young Chinese who grew up after the reform and opening-up really formed their own relatively independent youth subculture, and correspondingly, the influence of their peer groups began to rise further. From the perspective of the reform and opening-up process from 1978–2020, there are many macroinstitutional backgrounds that lead to the rise of peer group influence. First, the tolerance of politics, the popularization of university education, and the liberalization and diversification of career choice provided the post-70s, post-80s, post-90s, and even post-00s, who had grown up in the past four decades, with a stage to display their talents and a possibility for them to challenge adult authority, including parents. Second, the increasing frequency and rate of social mobility, the mainstreaming of two social mobility modes—“study in different places–employment in different places” and “leave the countryside to work” (Lu, 2004)—as Jin Yihong, a scholar quoted in the previous chapter, put it, form a “delocalization” of youth groups in terms of geographical boundaries and old relationships, and thus weaken parental control over offspring. Also, the influence of young people who study, live, and work together in foreign countries continues to grow, forming a kind of “culture of union” similar to what Margaret Mead called “cofigurative culture” (Mead, 1970: 25)—young people growing up began to model themselves on their early companions. Third, as the older children went out into the world, the one-child policy put into effect in the 1980s contributed to a large extent to the lonely only-child teenager with keys hanging around their necks leaving their families to seek friendship, understanding, and warmth among their peers. In those families where both parents went out to work, the peer group even became the main psychological comfort for children. Finally, as we shall discuss in Chapter 3, the development of the mass media, especially the electronic media from the 1990s, makes it possible for the younger generation to exchange, share, or vent their thoughts on the essence of life, scientific knowledge, life tips, emotional understanding, and even social resentment absent of the traditional sources of information or knowledge such as parents or teachers. In this way, in the socialization process of children, those students or peers who are

44 The peer group slightly older or who are better-informed become the spiritual leaders or life mentors instead of parents or teachers. When we first studied the social psychology and evolution of farmers from Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces in Zhejiang village, my interviewees BH and BI mentioned that interacting with peers of similar age was the main way for them to understand society, observe the market, and acquire the Beijing dialect. Almost all the children of the families interviewed later mentioned without exception that the communication with classmates or peers was one of the main sources for them to obtain a lot of knowledge and information. In Zhejiang village, the people who had the most say about the market and the economic situation were often not the elders, but the young people who came to Beijing first. The experience they gained from exploring the Beijing market was a missing link in their parents’ original knowledge stock, so they became entrepreneurial mentors and life models for others to follow. The children of the urban families interviewed later, no matter how old they were or what their major was, in addition to academic knowledge coming mainly from the classroom and teachers, their social knowledge, science and technology news, fashion trends, and life experiences came from two main sources. One was the mass media, including the Internet, which will be discussed later, and the other was the peer group discussed here. Considering that 8 million (2019) young people are now enrolled in universities every year, along with young people pursuing master’s and doctoral degrees in universities, China has formed a rolling university student population of more than 38 million (2019). Among peers, classmates, especially those in college, have become a prominent peer group and an important social force shaping the younger generation. These 38 million college students participate in class discussions, academic reports, panel discussions, and teacher–student conversations; in addition, through self-organized academic salons, college student clubs, various association activities, and “bedtime talk” in their spare time, they are free to express their views and opinions on scholarship, on life, on society, and even on politics, which is more or less considered “off limits”. Peer group communication is an important source of spiritual growth for these older children: College life is basically a collective life, and because we live in the collectivity, inevitably we will be affected by all aspects of it. For example, although everyone who enters our university is excellent, after all, personal vision and source of information is limited. But when we communicate with each other, our vision and information can be greatly expanded or broken through. Anyone who has had college experience knows that universities are information hubs. Take the “bedtime talk” after the dormitory lights are turned off every night as an example. This kind of informal communication, which is mixed with banter, ridicule and absurdity, is often the most intensive information exchange among students. At night, when it is time to go to bed, everyone is full of energy. From scientific discoveries to life lessons, to political gossip and even erotic news, there seems to be

The peer group 45 nothing to be afraid to say. And the speaker is often full of ostentation, feeling his vanity has been greatly satisfied. I sometimes went home for a week or two, and by the time I got back to school, I didn’t know a lot of things. For this reason, roommates often burst into laughter. (NFB, 1998) The claim of the NFB generation was borne out by the parents. NG’s son and daughter are both in college, so their coming home on weekends is like giving a press conference about things parents have never heard of. NGM said, “Some of their knowledge and information comes from university professors, but more from their own classmates and unrestrained communication between classmates, which is what our generation lacks now” (NGM, 1998). Indeed, for these young people, who are intelligent and thirst for knowledge, the arithmetical progression of communication with each other has given them a geometric progression of knowledge and information. This is such a situation that the parent generation is actually dealing not only with their own children, but with their group or whole generation. Thus, behind every humble child may stand a closely connected group of peers, who become the knowledge “reservoir” or “expanding memory” for children to influence or “backfeed” their parents. Like the modern rise of the peer group we discussed at the beginning of this chapter, special “others” in modern society may be the spiritual idols and identity objects of the younger generation, and further become the knowledge reservoir or expanding memory for that generation to backfeed to the older generation, not only because of the changes in the macro-factors in modern society, but also by having a profound and subtle personality and social psychology foundation. Here, there are two important links that cannot be ignored. First, how does the psychological process of identification or intergenerational identification occur in peer groups of similar biological ages? Second, how does the identification of such a pure psychological force translate into a real social existence, so that peer groups can replace parents and teachers as role models or life models for the younger generation? The first part of the discussion starts with the conceptual definition of “identity” or “social identity”. The word “identity” is directly related to the reflective understanding of who I am or who we are, where I am or where we are, and “recognition of a thing as different from all other things, and including in its unity all its inner changes and other diversities. Such a thing is said to remain the same or to have sameness” (Baldwin, 1998: 504). For a long time, identity and its related issues have been the focus of attention of sociologists and psychologists, and social psychology, formed in the intersection of these two disciplines, takes it as one of its core concepts (Zhou, 2008b). For example, as early as 1950, psychologist Eric Erickson listed “identity” and “identity crisis” as the themes of his book Childhood and Society, and deeply explored the relationship between identity and early life experiences (Erikson, 1950).4 In Erikson’s view, identity or identification is a sense of familiarity with oneself, a sense of

46 The peer group knowing one’s future goals, and an inner confidence in obtaining the expected approval from people one trusts (Erikson, 1959: 118). Although identity or identification is crucial to the psychosocial development of individuals, the issue of identity or identification is not innate. Before puberty, children’s identity is like pieces of cloth that have not yet been woven together. But by the end of adolescence, these scraps will have been woven into a single piece of fabric unique to the individual (Steinberg, 2007: 347). The patchwork process of these “rags” is, of course, a process in which adolescents acquire identity or identification. This occurs during adolescence, when, in addition to the physical and nervous maturation of the individual, children begin to disengage from their parents and make contact with others or society. It is this touch or interaction, as George Mead puts it, that requires the individual to understand the other’s posturing (Mead, 1934: 154) and to know himself according to the views of others—for this reason, Cooley calls others the “me in the mirror” (Cooley, 1992: 118), while Fei Xiaotong vividly compares this process to “I look at how others look at me” (Fei, 1993)—so a person’s sense of self or self-identity is nothing more than a reflection of what he or she is aware of what others think of him or herself. Further, this reflection constitutes the identity of the self; then the identification of this identity constitutes the group identity. Although from the standpoint of sociology, group identity is not the same as individual identity, the formation motivation of group identity is the same as that of individual identity: They are both about confirming their place in a group or society, and all group identification involves, as Harold Isaacs put it, clinging to the “house of Muubi” mentally or spiritually. Although the term “house of Muubi”, which symbolizes the womb or matrix, is borrowed from Kikuyus, the search for a spiritual “anchor”, for the self, or for an “I group” is a global exercise (Isaacs, 2010: 16). Moreover, personal identity problems are often catalyzed by insecurity, so it is a universal phenomenon that unstable or transitional groups, such as youth, urgently seek identity, especially intergenerational identity. The second part of the discussion involves how to combine the psychological process of identification with broader social forces, especially group forces. If we translate this thinking, which is similar to European social identity theory, into our discussion of intergenerational relations, a very practical issue is: Why are the younger generation more likely to accept the values, life attitudes, and social behavior patterns of their peers when they also interact and connect with their parents, teachers, or elders? The minimal-group paradigm, proposed by British social psychologist Henry Tajfel, provides an excellent explanation. In the experiment, Tajfel first asked the subjects to conduct a point estimation experiment on a card. Based on this, the subjects were randomly divided into two groups: the “overestimate group” and the “underestimate group”, who were then asked to work on resource allocation. The results showed that although participants did not know each other and had never met or actually interacted with members of the same group, they still allocated more resources to members of their own group (Tajfel et al.,

The peer group 47 1971). In other words, even if there was no prior interaction, as long as the subjects simply perceived the categorization, they would allocate more resources and positive evaluations to their own group. This kind of perceptual classification will make us subjectively perceive that we belong to others, thus creating a sense of identity (Zhang & Zuo, 2006). If we say that the experiment of Sherif et al., as early as in the 1960s, revealed that the real conflict caused by the competition for objective resources would have some influence on group and inter-group behaviors (Sherif et al., 1961), Tajfel’s experiment, then, further reveals that awareness of group membership is the minimum condition for group behavior. Thus, once people become members of a simple or even meaningless category, it is enough to produce group-oriented perceptions and behaviors, which shows that subjective group identification will produce objective behavioral consequences. Because of this subjective intergenerational identity, the younger generation realize their similarity and consistency, their shared interests, preferences and interests, and the psychological and physical differences between them and other groups, especially adult groups, and eventually form peer groups and subcultures that are abler to constrain their consciousness and actions. The formation of a youth subculture or peer group is very similar to the formation of the British working class described by the British historian Edward Thompson: Just as the subjective “consciousness” plays an important role in the objective “existence” of the working class,5 “intergenerational identity” is equally important in the formation of young peer groups. Further, and most importantly, this mutual identification and alienation from adult groups, including parents and teachers, is the result of industrialization or modernization, both physically and psychologically—because it is industrialization or modernization that makes it possible for the younger generation to think and act together in a “group” way, outside of the family, in school or society. In this sense, peer group or intergenerational identity is itself a kind of modernity, the result of the interaction between modern society and the biological stage of individual physiological maturity.

The family and the school: how do conventional institutions decline? The rising influence of peer groups is not an isolated phenomenon. To a large extent, it is related to the declining influence of families and schools in modern society, especially in the electronic age. If the family has been regarded as the basic unit of social life and part of a vast social network since human beings evolved a civilized society, even as the American sociologist William Goode said, it is the only social system that transforms a biological organism into a human being (Goode, 1964: 8), and schools are the institutionalized organizations that appeared widely after human beings formed civilized society, especially in modern times, the first bridge that leads children from family to society; and as Parsons said,

48 The peer group the school is the first socializing agency in the child’s experience which institutionalizes a differentiation of status on nonbiological bases. Moreover, this is not an ascribed but an achieved status; it is the status “earned” by differential performance of the tasks set by the teacher, who is acting as an agent of the community’s school system. (Parsons, 1964: 133) In this way, both families and schools play an important role in the formation of the traditions of human civilization and the process of intergenerational transmission, so the formation of youth culture and the improvement of peer group influence must be analyzed on the premise that the traditions represented by families and schools or parents and teachers are declining in contemporary social life. The family is clearly an older social institution than the school. The family, the basic unit of social life formed by marriage, blood, or adoption, has the basic functions of production, emotional comfort, sexual satisfaction, and education or socialization. If childbirth, emotional comfort or sexual satisfaction can all occur, some can even only occur, between peer couples, the function of education or socialization is generally limited to parent-child or intergenerational relationship, which directly involves the inheritance of human group values and culture. What distinguishes humans from animals are the so-called “cultures”, including values, attitudes, and social behavior, which need to be passed down from generation to generation. Such inheritance can not only bring a convenience to the individual human life, but also an accumulation of human group civilization, which is called “socialization” by sociologists. Through the process of socialization, the younger generation acquires the values and life knowledge of their own ethnic group, and learns the roles appropriate to their social status, thus becoming appropriate members of the social life of the group. The family plays the most important role in the socialization process (Goode, 1964: 10, 19–20). The importance of the family to the socialization of human groups is that this primary group, with its large number of direct, face-to-face interactions, as Charles Cooley put it, is not only the starting point for the socialization of each individual, but also provides the space and time for the older generation, with varying degrees of mastery of human culture, to urge, educate, and admonish the babbling younger generation. It is clear that most of the experiences and teachings parents pass on to their children are not entirely the result of their own direct experience and perception, but come from the whole society outside the family, which itself is the product of individual socialization and the accumulation of human civilization. Children are exposed to past experiences and human culture through their families or through their parents and grandparents: “He first learns about the world beyond his immediate radius of experience from his parents” (Shils, 1981: 170), and this is actually the most straightforward and obvious tradition that ordinary people are exposed to. For this reason, Cooley argued that “the fact that the family and neighborhood groups are

The peer group 49 ascendant in the open and plastic time of childhood makes them even now incomparably more influential than all the rest” (Cooley, 1909: 26). Therefore, in terms of the basis of human sociality and human ideals, the family, like the neighborhood, is “clearly the nursery of human nature in the world about us” (Cooley, 1909: 26). However, the influence of the family on human groups has changed dramatically since industrialization, particularly since the 20th century. The most important factor is the miniaturization or centralization of family size. In the words of Goode, this revolution in the family pattern has caused the traditional family system (whether or not the clan system is included), usually dominated by the extended family and the united family, to collapse along with industrialization for more than a century (Goode, 1964: 108). And the revolution of the family model is part of the great revolution sweeping the whole world in modern times, which gives millions of people the power of their own choice and gives rise to the desire to overthrow the old government, create a new society, and launch a new social movement (Goode, 1964: 380). The revolutionary significance of the change of the family pattern is firstly reflected in the fact that individuals, especially young individuals, have gained more freedom in marriage and life, which is because the control of the older generation that has been in place for thousands of years starts to go wrong. In Chapter 2 of the first volume of this book, we spent a considerable amount of time discussing the traditional Chinese family system and the filial tradition and order formed around it. This traditional family system “has remained largely unchanged for thousands of years” (Sun, 2012: 93). Not only is it the product of thousands of years of Chinese society, but in fact it has also maintained the continuation of this traditional society from generation to generation. As Mark Hertel says, it serves as a general pattern of continuity over time to offset the variations that gradually take place in the basic structure of Chinese society. The absence of significant social change during this long period of history is at least partly due to a tradition rooted in parental authority and control (Hertel, 1981: 392). Although later than the Western world, the traditional Chinese family system has undergone revolutionary changes in modern times. The first impetus for family reform came from the revolution of 1911 and the new culture movement of the May Fourth Movement with “science” and “democracy” as the banner, and then the Communist Revolution, which surged through the 20th century, especially after 1978. Before 1949, the main reasons for family changes in China can be attributed to ideological factors, institutional factors, political factors, social factors, and educational factors, as Sun Benwen has asserted (Sun, 2012: 93–94). As for the post-1949 period, as Hertel puts it, the following four major events in China all contributed to the liberation of women and accelerated the disintegration of traditional paternalism (Hertel, 1981: 408). These four major events include: the marriage law of 1950, the Great Leap Forward movement that started in 1958, the Cultural Revolution that began in 1966, and the “historic transformation” of the reform and opening-up after the death of Mao Zedong in 1978. However, in the previous chapter, we stressed through Shen

50 The peer group Yifei that, in fact, “communism has not completely dismantled patriarchy”; what really led to the collapse of patriarchy and the Chinese family revolution was the radical change that Hertel failed to see at the time of writing The Changing Family in the early 1980s: urbanization, marketization, and the one-child policy introduced after the 1980s. The fundamental reason why China’s large-scale industrialization, which began in the Mao Zedong era, failed to break down family traditions and lead the younger generation from families to schools, factories and society, as the West did, is that the social system of urban and rural separation implemented by the industrialization in the planned economy era limited population mobility to the greatest extent, and kept the younger generation under the control of the older generation even as adults, and that the distribution system, biased toward revolutionary experience and seniority, makes the younger generation dependent on the older generation. For example, Deborah Davis-Friedmann noted that not only did many young people have to live together with their parents after marriage because they did not have their own house, but “it is common for urban children to contribute only 50 or 60 percent of their wages to cover the joint living expenses and to keep the remainder for their own savings or personal expenses” (Davis-Friedmann, 1991: 50). Furthermore, young people depend on their parents for jobs when the state is unable to provide new work. Taking over the jobs of one’s parents, a way of obtaining a job that subsisted before the Cultural Revolution, even became an “ordinary procedure” (DavisFriedmann, 1991: 27) at the beginning of the reform and opening-up in 1978.6 The high dependence of the younger generation on their parents or family for housing, living expenses, and occupation not only maintains the domination and educational power of the elders over the younger generation, but also fundamentally maintains the family tradition of patriarchy. From the perspective of intergenerational relations, the real decline of family tradition in Chinese society really originated from the reform after 1978. In Chapter 1, we attributed the decline of the traditional patriarchy and the resulting inversion of the traditional parent–child relationship to urbanization, marketization, and the implementation of the one-child policy in the 1980s. We have demonstrated that urbanization promotes the centralization and miniaturization of Chinese families, and the “de-regionalization” of the population associated with urbanization, especially of the younger generation, which weakens the parental control over the offspring. Marketization increases the economic returns of the younger generation with human capital, thereby reducing the traditional dominance of the older generation over the family. Finally, the one-child policy has not only changed Chinese people’s concept of parenting, but also changed the relative importance of parents and children in family life, making children more important than ever. It can be said that it is precisely these macro- and micro-economic and social changes that have broken the rigid Chinese family tradition that has persisted for thousands of years. At the same time, the influence of peer groups has become more and more powerful.

The peer group 51 In the face of this disconnect, and in the hope that the child’s peer group will play a more positive role, parents who want to give their children more rational decision-making power as the parent–child relationship changes are also trying to combine parent–child or family influence with peer group influence. During my visit to Shanghai, SKM, who teaches family sociology at the university, talked about the eye-opening self-study camp experiment called “Energy Fun” that she started promoting two years ago. “Energy Fun” is a term invented by SKM. The new teaching method hopes to bring “positive energy”—the energy of knowledge—to children in a playful and humorous atmosphere. The original purpose of SKM was to expand her daughter SKG’s extracurricular education, so she brought together the children of 14 families she knew and who volunteered to join, and had activities for two hours every Saturday. Well-designed teaching courses were rich in content, including question training, mock interviews (the most successful was having the children interview their grandmothers and draw “family trees” for their families), campus orientation (visiting Fudan University under the guidance of the teacher), ethical problem discussion, a logic competition, and Energy Fun lectures (a presentation at the end of the course), among which the most challenging were surveys of various social issues, including the Spring Festival, my family’s dining table (what is green food?), class work, public toilets, and disabled people. SKM says: I first promoted this program to solve the exam-oriented education problem in my daughter’s study, so it was mostly the children of friends and acquaintances, being my daughter’s age. Because I had a course in family sociology in university, I had a good understanding of general social problems. At first I asked my children to do their own thinking or research exactly as I wanted them to, and I didn’t think they would go beyond my imagination. But in fact, they often had unexpected imagination, which had a great impact on me. For example, in the toilet civilization survey we arranged, in addition to the toilets in Shanghai or China, we also asked children who had the opportunity to go abroad with their parents during the summer vacation to do cross-country comparative studies. As a result, some went to Italy, Japan, South Korea, and some went to Vietnam or the United States. (SKG interjected, “I found that the toilets in Italy have a lot of painting, full of artistic atmosphere, and in Japan, the toilets are very clean, while in China, the toilets are so dirty that you don’t want to go in.” SKM said, “There are also many clean ones.” SKG replied, “They all come from fancy restaurants.”) I was most inspired by research on people with disabilities. At first I was unwilling to do this kind of research, because so many people had done it in China that it wouldn’t be original. However, after the research, the children pointed out a problem that was not expected by the adults. The problem they pointed out was: Disabled people don’t go out for the sake of going out, so blind paths and so on can’t solve the final problem. (SKG chimed in again, “Take the ATM machine in Shanghai for

52 The peer group example. Disabled people can’t reach the height of the machine even if they enter the self-help bank. But in northern Europe, you can lift the machine up and down, so it’s very human.”) You could say the kids saw the problem, and they were amazing. (SKM, 2014) When discussing the continuation of the tradition of human civilization, the American sociologist Edward Hills regarded the church and school as the main maintenance system of tradition in Western society, following the family (Shils, 1981: 234). Although the Roman Catholic church has a longer history than any university—like the University of Bologna founded in 1088 in Italy or Paris University in France founded in 1292—in Western civilization,7 considering the specific situation in China, our interest here is in the school. Although great changes have taken place in education since the 19th century, and universities have added to the task of discovery, ever since schools appeared in human history, conveying and explaining past achievements have been their recognized basic function (Shils, 1981: 240). That is why, like the family, schools, including universities, have been the inheritors of the traditions of human civilization and one of the oldest institutions of society, whose mission is to study and deliver the knowledge treasures of all carefully studied fields of knowledge (Ruegg, 2007, Vol. 1: 9). The emergence of school as a social system, in both China and the West, was not a specialized or independent educational institution at the beginning. In China, the earliest “school” appeared in the Western Zhou dynasty, which was called piyong, the place where the slave owners studied. Later, it was successively named xiang, xu, xue, xiao, and shu, so the “ancient educators have shu at home, xiang in the community, xu in the town, and xue in the capital” (Book of Rites), which were not only places for reading, but also for shooting and retirement. The school reached its peak in the Tang dynasty, and its institutions became increasingly developed due to the promotion of the imperial examination system. At the end of the Qing dynasty, modern education was set up, which was called xuetang in the Charter of the Imperial School in the 28th year of Guangxu (1902). After the revolution of 1911, education institutions were called xuexiao when the ministry of education of the Republic of China announced the new school system (the Renzi School System) from 1912 to 1913. In Western history, the broad sense of “school” dates back to the time of Socrates. At that time a number of wise men who were traveling about came to Athens and earned their living by teaching their citizens. Later, Plato opened his Academy in the woods near Athens, which would last for centuries. However, this academy was not primarily about teaching, but more similar to a “salon” in the modern sense. “Schools” with a “school system” in a real or narrow sense appeared in the Middle Ages, when, in addition to some law schools and liberal arts schools, there were more missionary schools that mainly taught religious knowledge. Then there was the Renaissance, followed by the Enlightenment, which promoted the development of education and the advancement of universities to the public and society. In

The peer group 53 particular, “the success of the program of the Enlightenment reduced the prominence of theology”, promoted the secularization of universities and education, and “an end of scholasticism was decreed thereby, as was also a redirection of the sciences towards empiricism and practical application” (Ruegg, 2007, Vol. 2: 629, 637). Just as Cooley said that the family is the nurturing place of humanity, the school we discuss here is not only the carrier of tradition, but also the “nurturer of ‘youth’” in modern times (Chen, 2007: 154), because as a social category, and not just as a stage of physical development, “youth” is actually the product of modern school education, which has become more and more popular and prolonged since the Industrial Revolution. For example, in a traditional agricultural society like China, a child of 13 or 14 who has just entered the period of physiological development may join his parents in the labor force tomorrow. There is no long transition period between the child and the adult. In modern China, the emergence of “youth” is related to the continuous growth of the student group formed in modern education. Just four years after the abolition of the imperial examination system in 1909, 1.56 million students were enrolled in the new schools, some of whom went to “boarding schools” with reference to American and British ones. The number of students studying abroad was also expanding, with more than 10,000 students studying in Japan alone (Fei & Liu, 1993: 440, 406). This is how the student body began to break away from the constraints of family and parents to a precocious life called “youth” with a certain distance from society, and to place hope in the reforming of old China by Liang Qichao, Chen Duxiu, and Hu Shi. Clearly, in industrial societies, especially post-industrial societies, the extension of formal schooling has changed the way we define “adolescence” and “youth”. Not only in developed countries like Europe and America, but also in a rapidly changing developing country like China, in recent decades more and more young people have entered universities or colleges to continue their studies after finishing secondary education, and thus the transition to adult work and family roles was delayed (Furstenberg, 2000; Ma, 2011).8 In this way, more and more schools and years of schooling not only produce more and more “young people”, but also raise the upper limit of the age of “youth”. If schools, by pulling young people out of the home, have considerably disrupted family traditions and become increasingly influential, in a world of bigger schools, more crowded young people, and more diverse means of communication, including electronic media, as interactions between teachers and students decline in frequency and dominance,9 the influence of peer groups that form around the school but extend beyond it is also on the rise, and will no doubt in turn undermine the school tradition. According to Edward Hills, if the influence of parents and teachers declines, children will have to set their own standards, which means that they accept the standards of their most influential contemporaries (Shils, 1981: 231). When discussing peer culture and modern education, the American sociologist James Coleman said that youth culture represents a transition between young people and larger society (Coleman, 1966: 244). We have discussed that

54 The peer group youth is the product of modern industrial society, so youth culture is also a unique social phenomenon in industrial and post-industrial society. Coleman has made it clear that youth culture is in fact a peer culture. If such theories of youth from the West have any kind of universal value or explanatory power in the different countries that have successively entered industrial society, China’s experience in the field of intergenerational relations over the past 42 years, including cultural reverse, should also confirm that the formation of contemporary Chinese youth culture is based on the emergence of a large number of peer groups and the rise of their influence. If, as is said, learning among peer groups is greater than the sum of family and school (New Weekly, 2010: 191), with increasingly diversified peer groups, the traditional relationship among youth, family, and school will surely undergo a reconstruction, and the so-called tradition based on family and school will surely undergo a historic evolution.

Growing up in cyber culture For most of the 20th century, the challenges to home and school from real youth peer groups were manageable. Parents and teachers, by virtue of their status advantages, economic means, or institutional educational power conferred by biological facts or social structures, can still, to a certain extent, instill mainstream social values into their children through families and schools, and maintain traditions that are lax but do not collapse. But the rise of cyber society after the 1990s has inexorably upset that balance. The virtual peer group formed around the electronic network, relying on network technology, especially the web2.0 network technology popularized after 2003, not only develops the rebellious, independent, interactive, and creative youth culture to the extreme, but also constructs a brand new youth culture—a network culture in fact. The rise of a network culture provides the younger generation with the realistic possibility of breaking away from the control of the elders and growing freely, which makes them become the leaders of the Internet era and the feeders of the older generation. Network culture is a new way of human existence based on information technology and carried by the Internet, including all the cultural forms, cultural products derived from the network and its applications, and the human interaction or communication mode prevailing on the network. If culture is the product of human communication or contact, human cultural forms can be divided into oral culture, text culture, print culture, electronic culture, and the network culture we are talking about (Li & Chen, 2005). If the birth of language made it possible for human society to communicate and think, the birth of writing made it possible for the speaker or thinker to be separated from what he says or thinks, and the advent of printing increased the breadth of this separation. Further, the electronic or audio-visual culture constructed through film, radio, and television in the 20th century effectively destroyed the identity hierarchy established by writing or written culture, making it a true mass medium or mass culture, so that Friedrich Williams could say: After the war, there was an explosion or revolution in communication in the world led by television (Williams, 1982).

The peer group 55 In a sense, the emergence of the Internet in the second half of the 20th century was an epoch-making revolution comparable to the emergence of the written word. The main feature of this revolution, in the words of sociologist Manuel Castells, is “the formation of a hypertext and a meta-language which, for the first time in history, integrate into the same system the written, oral, and audio-visual modalities of human communication” (Castells, 2010a: 356). Text, image, and sound are integrated into one system at the same time. Under the condition of open and readable paths, people in different places or spaces can interact on the network at a selected time, which is a new mode of communication indeed. The novelty of this mode of communication lies in its cyberspace, as the Canadian science fiction writer William Gibson once said. In the 1984 novel Neuromancer, cyberspace is a computer-generated space into which characters plug in. For Gibson, cyberspace is a sympathetic illusion which is not a real space, but an imaginary space (Kramarae, 1995: 38). For the sake of imagination, Gibson and Barlow describe it as the space where you talk on the phone (Gibson & Barlow, 1992: 78). In fact, whether on the phone or on the computer, if you have to communicate with others in a certain space, this space is called “cyberspace”. So, you are sitting in a Newtonian physical space on one side of the screen, and interacting with the other side of the screen in a mysterious cyberspace. Although cyberspace is virtual, the interactions that take place there and their consequences can be real. Because cyberspace is virtual, so are the peer groups of young people who meet and interact in it. The virtuality of the peer group formed in cyberspace is fully reflected in the title of “net friends”, just as “no one knows you are a dog on the Internet”, people interacting with each other are just an anonymous symbol on the Internet. However, because people can engage in more convenient, frequent, diversified, and in-depth interaction on the Internet through various kinds of common media or new media than in real life, its impact on the virtual peer group is not only real but also powerful. It will play a role in “a larger social space scale than ever before, and form a power to deconstruct and reconstruct the existing social structure” (Chen, 1998). There are all kinds of shared media that interact through the web, including email lists, discussion groups (its common form is Usenet newsgroup, BBS, and Forum), chats, web logs, podcasting, the Wiki Model, social software and virtual community, synergy and publishing, XML (extensible markup language), peer-to-peer communication, video sharing, and massively multiplayer roleplaying games (Hu, 2008: 90–113). Take the extremely popular BBS and Forum in China. They are basically electronic communities based on discussions about politics, society, economics, sports, technology, and almost everything, including dating. The former includes Shuimu Tsinghua (Tsinghua University BBS), Lily (Nanjing University BBS), Weiming (Peking University BBS), and Riyue Guanghua (Fudan University BBS). At present, almost every university in China has a BBS. As long as you follow some basic rules, you are free to register and enter, choose your favorite sections, and make personal comments on relevant issues. The latter includes “Tianya”, “Xici.net”,

56 The peer group “Qiangguo BBS”, and “Baidu tieba”, which open up a simple interactive communication environment and attract a large number of people to gather, providing electronic commons for the dissemination and discussion of public topics. Although both BBS and Forum are free to enter, it is clear that young people are the most conventional composition of “netizens”. Age is a key variable, which gives us good reasons to regard netizens as a kind of virtual peer group. As we have discussed, as a primary group, the general peer group, in addition to similar age, also includes voluntary entry, emotional communication, equal interaction, and distinct subculture. In contrast, the virtuality of the Internet makes netizens more prominently display the above characteristics of peer groups. First, in the anonymous state, members are more free to enter, and the restriction of the network area no longer exists.10 This breaks the physical space and occupational proximity of the average peer group, and even biological age is no longer necessary for membership. As long as you are interested in the topic of a certain section or Forum, you can participate in it, and you don’t need to worry about group pressure when you quit the communication space (Wang & Liu, 2006). Second, in anonymity, people’s emotional communication is more natural and convenient, especially when the discussion involves politics, sex, or personal privacy, because there is no face-to-face pressure and mutual restriction. In this regard, IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is better than BBS and Forum. Although it is generally not as long-winded as BBS, it has the characteristics of real-time interaction, which, if coupled with microphone and camera, guarantees the free and full communication of emotions and generates much network love and friendship. Third, in anonymity, there is no pressure or “threat” due to age or social differences, so even the weaker party in the real world is free to organize the topic (or to use Goffman’s language, to construct the “conversation starter” as the basis of interaction) or not reply after reading the post. The network and even the mobile phone and other peer-topeer communication technologies are characterized by “decentralization” (Zhou, 2011a). On the one hand, this effectively deconstructs the “narrator’s discourse” of propaganda usually used by the dominant party;11 on the other hand, it also endows the communication of netizens with unprecedented interactivity. Fourth, also in anonymity, peer groups like netizens have more distinct subcultural characteristics. Not only do they deliberately seek to maintain a degree of independence from mainstream culture, but it is easy to form some subculture atmosphere or network environment completely different from the mainstream culture through the Internet. In such an atmosphere or environment, there are no more hierarchical systems and top-down communication channels, and their own subcultural values and network rules are formed. The network buzzwords we discussed in Chapter 4 of the first volume of this book are the prominent representation of this youth subculture. If the emergence of Internet technology, especially the promotion of web2.0 technology and the arrival of the network society, is embedded into the social structure at the macro-level and changes it to some extent, and creates a new way of life or of surviving at the micro-level, then this process will naturally

The peer group 57 have a profound impact on the daily life and spiritual growth of human beings, especially the younger generation, and make the molding process of the latter begin to shift from the traditional single real socialization model to the modern multi-socialization model, including the virtual one (Yao & Zhang, 2004). In this sense, although the Internet and the resulting peer group are virtual, what we call “growing up in cyber culture” is a real psychological consequence. Here, we can at least discuss the influence of network culture on the spiritual world of the younger generation in terms of the following aspects. First of all, through online interaction, virtual peer groups meet the psychological needs of individuals, especially adolescents, for self-formation and belonging in the socialization process. On the other hand, it enriches the social communication among individuals, and provides them with a participation path to cultivate their communication ability, understand the rules of interaction, and adapt to the social environment. From this point of view, we can be sure that the network virtual peer group is of positive significance to the growth of the younger generation’s spiritual world. From the perspective of social psychology, the mature self is the basis of personality formation, which then forms the necessary psychological dynamic system for people to adapt to society. However, the self grows through interaction with others, that is, through social interaction. Because as a social person, you can only exist in other people’s minds or imagination, as we have discussed before with Cooley’s “looking-glass” concept, “a social self of this sort might be called the reflected or looking-glass self: ‘Each to each a lookingglass’” (Cooley, 1992: 184). Furthermore, if daily interactions provide people with opportunities to reflect on each other, then interactions on the Internet can provide people with channels to “watch” each other. This is because anonymity allows a person’s online “presence” (Goffman, 1959) to often be closer to reality, and the two people interacting with each other have a more accurate view of each other. SAB is a young man who has benefited a lot from the Internet. This boy we mentioned in Chapter 1. He was studying economics at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, was addicted to online games, and could not extricate himself before his sophomore year. For this reason, his mother SAM even consulted with her best friend in college, Shu Chang, a professor who later studied psychology. As the saying goes, “Whoever started the trouble should end it”. It was the Internet that SAB was later able to use to mend his ways—he fell in love online in his junior year! At first, his own parents, SAF and SAM, thought his relationship was unreliable, while his girlfriend's parents were terrified that their child would be cheated by a bad guy. After a semester of dating, SAB and his girlfriend made an appointment to meet each other in the summer vacation. First SAB flew to Lanzhou, where his girlfriend was attending college; her mother was very nervous during their two days of dating there. Two days later, SAB went with his girlfriend back to her hometown in Lvliang, Shanxi province, where her parents finally felt relieved. Interestingly, SAB had to give up

58 The peer group online gaming because he was too busy dating his girlfriend online in his spare time; the Internet gave them a whole new way of dating: And that’s when I realized that the Internet was actually quite positive. For example, MM and I watch movies together through QQ video on the Internet, record songs and discuss learning together—I can teach her Japanese, while I have always been interested in ancient Chinese and ancient phonology, and MM happens to be studying literature, so she can also teach me. . . . We communicated on the Internet for half a year. After we met in the summer vacation, we found that the other person was the one we were familiar with on the Internet. There was no difference at all, so we hit it off. In addition, because I am in a good mood now, not only has my academic performance improved, increasing from 1.92 GPA (1.8 is the pass line, 4.0 is full marks) to 3.2 GPA. But I also fell in love with fitness, and have gradually become more confident and physically better. Now I am a graduate student in the United States, and MM has been recommended to the school of literature of Wuhan University, so I think this love is really OK! (SAB, 2014) In terms of social interaction or social participation, the Internet is also an effective path. Although most of the text on the Internet seems random to some adults, in fact, the important issues related to publicity have always attracted the attention of netizens. Taking 2010 as an example, the top ten issues of concern to network opinion leaders with regard to young people as the main body were as follows: the Qian Yunhui case in Yueqing; the campus car accident; the case of the Fenghuang girl who jumped from a building after being molested by the police; the shipping collision in the Diaoyu Islands; frequent campus kills; the “bloody” demolition incident in Yihuang; the Tang Jun “diplomagate”; the Jing’an fire in Shanghai; the sweatshop for mentally handicapped people in Xinjiang; and the attack on Fang Zhouzi (Yu, 2011: 9). In China, the Internet is often a powerful tool for citizens to fight corruption, as officials are increasingly corrupt and the mass media such as television and newspapers lack active and effective supervision. Numerous corrupt officials have been dismissed in recent years by “human flesh searches” on the Internet, among which the most famous are Zhou Jiugeng, who smoked “Nine-Five Supreme” cigarettes, and Yang Dacai, or “Brother Watch”. The former was subjected to a human flesh search by netizens in late 2008 for making inappropriate comments to the media, such as “no lowering of housing prices”. He was found, as a section chief of housing administration, to smoke daily Nine-Five Supreme cigarettes, which cost as much as 150 CNY per pack. The latter was disliked by netizens for smiling at the scene of the “Yan’an traffic accident” in the summer of 2012, and a following online human flesh search revealed that this Shanxi provincial security chief had worn 11 watches on different occasions, the most expensive of which was worth 400,000 CNY. Zhou Jiugeng and Yang Dacai were both

The peer group 59 punished by the relevant departments shortly after they were searched on the Internet, and “Nine-Five Supreme” cigarette and “Brother Watch” became popular Internet phrases of the year. Secondly, through network interaction, online virtual peer groups can smoothly realize the “transition” or “bond crossing” from family to school, from school to society, or from one social environment to another. In this process of transition or bond crossing, online virtual peer groups can serve as intermediaries or bridges for families, schools, and societies—what the American sociologist Patricia Phelan calls “multiworlds”. In other words, the emergence of the Internet and the formation of virtual communities online provides the possibility for the younger generation to exercise their identities or play roles and transform their environment, which also lays a foundation for them to enter society smoothly in the future. When Phelan began his experiments in the fall of 1989, titled “The multiple worlds of students and their displacement”, most studies of youth socialization were separate ones about the social impact of family, school, and peer groups on student growth. Through a study of 54 high school students at four schools, Phelan et al. argued that students are minors living in a multiworld. This multiworld consists primarily of families, schools, and peer groups, and each world contains the values, beliefs, expectations, actions, and emotional reactions familiar to those in the circle (Phelan & Yu, 1993: 53), which constitute the socalled social setting in which children grow up. In the process of socialization, children who adapt well can easily jump from one environment to another, a phenomenon known as “social transition”. What’s remarkable about Phelan is that she shows that children are at risk when their environment shifts, and may be faced with conflicting worlds, or worlds with closed borders, and thus become loners who fail in their attempt to cross borders. To avoid this outcome, what is required is not just understanding other people’s cultures, but that students must acquire the skills and strategies to work closely with different groups of people, not just themselves, in a conflictual society (Phelan & Yu, 1993: 85). As far as Phelan’s research is concerned in understanding the growth of Chinese youth, in the last three decades, with the quickening pace of life, the miniaturization of families, the rigidity of school systems, and the solidification of classes, as well as the hardening of the walls or barriers between families, schools, peer groups, and even classes, the younger generation is indeed increasingly likely to be the losers who cross the line. In Internet chatrooms, you can express your warmth and concerns; on BBS, you can learn about the dynamics of the school and society and express your opinions; and on Forum, the electronic public domain, you are able to communicate and discuss public topics that appear in society or are of general concern to the public. Secondly, in the network society, “crossing the boundary” in different environments, such as home, school, and society, only requires tapping on the keyboard. This kind of “intervention” provides a convenience for the younger generation who have not really entered society sufficiently to be familiar with its rules and public

60 The peer group expectations. Although this kind of intervention is usually far away from the real world due to the lack of adult participation, it still provides a simulated path for the younger generation to be exposed to reality earlier. Thirdly, online virtual peer groups can further form various non-governmental organizations and communities spontaneously formed by “netizens”, especially young netizens, through online interaction. Considering that “the virtual ‘society’ is certainly not satisfied with the virtual interaction on the Internet, but must be transformed into actual social action” (Chen, 1998), we can even say that virtual peer groups can promote the development of civil society in real life and ultimately contribute to the formation of democratic politics and civil society in China. The relationship between the Internet and civil society and even the construction of political democracy in China has always been a hot topic. Given the lack of democracy in China, the low level of freedom of the media, and the poor tolerance of citizens to the views of others,12 since its advent, especially in China, many people hope that the Internet can contribute to the construction of civil society and political democratization by promoting the formation of the public sphere. In 2004, Mary Meeker, a researcher at Morgan Stanley, pointed out in the “China Internet report” that large numbers of Internet users gathered in BBS, chat rooms, and Forum, indicating that the Internet opens the way for increased interactivity in a Chinese culture that is not known for self-expression and interaction (Meeker, 2004: 17). In 2005, in this “new world”, Zhou Yongming discussed the delicate relationship between folk political writers and the government in China’s cyberspace through his field study of Beijing: On the one hand, folk writers express their new citizenship by deeply accepting and interpreting information and accepting different political views. On the other hand, the state also uses new resources such as private capital to serve its control purposes as much as possible. (Zhou, 2005) Apparently, for the young netizens with a more democratic consciousness, the significance of the Internet, as an article in Beijing News reported in 2006, “lies in freedom, which may be one of their few channels of expression” (Hu, 2008: 303). This expression channel fully demonstrated its power in the Xiamen XP event in 2007. Esarey and Xiao Qiang discussed this event and proposed that “bloggers in China have succeeded at spreading the word about government malfeasance, misleading media reports, and political dissent” and “controlling the information available to Chinese citizens will become more difficult as new communication technology, such as blogging, empowers people to broadcast their views to an unprecedented degree” (Esarey & Xiao, 2008: 759, 772). Further, through the analysis of the two famous Forums “Strengthening the Nation Forum” and “Huaxia Educated Youth”, the question was raised as to “how the Internet and civil society in China interact in a mutually plastic way”. In China, “this co-change process also means that the development of civil society will promote the democratic application of the Internet, and the promotion of the Internet will also shape the civil society” (Yang, 2003).

The peer group 61 The “tree preservation movement” in Nanjing in March 2011 is an excellent example of the connection between the Internet and the development of civil society. It is well known that Sun Yat-sen’s body was moved from Biyun Temple in Beijing to Zhongshan Mausoleum in Nanjing in May 1929. In 1928, in honor of Sun Yatsen’s “Feng’an ceremony”, Liu Jiwen, then the first mayor of Nanjing, selected 1,500 wutongs (sycamores), presented by the Ministry of Works of the French Concession in Shanghai, as roadside trees, and planted them along the tens of kilometers of road from Xiaguan Pier to Zhongshan Mausoleum where the coffin passed. Later, after the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1949, wutongs were planted on both sides of the roads in Nanjing, tens of thousands of which shaded the sky and became the best symbol of the natural ecology of the ancient city. The problem occurred in the “development” era after 1978, which was “centered on economic construction”. Back in the mid-1990s, Wang Wulong, then mayor of Nanjing and a graduate of Nanjing Forestry University majoring in forestry and the chemical industry, cut down thousands of wutongs along Zhongshan North Road, Zhongshan Road, and Zhongshan East Road, thus gaining the title of “mayor of tree cutting”. In 2000, as roads in Nanjing were widened and subways were built, the wutongs were felled again. By 2005, as many as 20,000 trees had been felled in a decade (Ju, 2011). In 2011, when Nanjing subway lines three and ten were ready for construction, the authorities expected to move 1,100 street trees, more than 200 of which were wutongs, some more than 60 years old. On March 9, more than 40 wutongs on Taiping North Road were “laid down” to make way for Daxinggong Station of subway line three. And the good news this time is that the Internet changed the fate of the wutongs, which were decimated in the 1990s: Huang Jianxiang, a media man, Meng Fei, a host, and Lu Chuan, a director, each with thousands of fans on their blogs, all wrote about the felling of the wutongs, and within a week or so, tens of thousands of people had joined, with 16,909 comments. “Nanjing Greenstone”, a local environmental NGO in Nanjing, launched the “smile campaign” on their blog, participants of which tied green ribbons to trees along the road and held up signs that read “Please use your smile to keep the trees in Nanjing”. On March 19, thousands of young citizens holding hands online gathered in front of the Nanjing library square near the Grand Palace. Meanwhile, a poem titled “The winter is too long in this spring” was repeated: What disappears at the fingertips Is more than just Feeling What vanishes in the mind Is not all Memory What’s lost in the heart Is not mere Conscience

62 The peer group What’s missing in the world Is not simply Affection It’s a tree, a path that records the rise and fall of a nation. By coincidence, 2011 marks the 100th anniversary of the 1911 revolution. The unique political position of Nanjing in modern Chinese history finally determined that this tree preservation movement aroused the attention of the Kuomintang people and media across the strait. Faced with the dual pressure of Internet crowds and Taiwan compatriots, on March 15, the Nanjing municipal government responded positively for the first time by optimizing the plan to protect the big trees. On March 18, tree removal work was halted on subway line three, and soon after a “green assessment commission” was established with the participation of ordinary citizens to draw up a new tree removal plan. An environmental storm on both sides of the Taiwan straits finally subsided: Under the new plan, Line Three will claim 318 trees, mostly wutongs, but it will spare more than two-thirds of trees that were to be moved. The city promised to give each uprooted tree a number and track its health wherever it is replanted. And henceforth, Mr. He said, every construction plan that affects ordinary citizens will first be reviewed by a green assessment commission. Moreover, the government will get citizens involved before, not after, it digs up trees, he said. All in hopes of preserving a separate, arboreal peace. (Shiho Fukada, 2011) For more than a year after the Nanjing tree preservation movement, on various occasions, I kept meeting friends who had tied green ribbons on wutongs or gathered in front of the library. Most of them worked in schools, media, companies, social groups, institutions, and youth and higher education; a strong sense of participation was a common characteristic of this group. The other common feature of them was that they were all senior “netizens”. They spent their spare time or even work time on the Internet, immersed in the democratic and equal atmosphere created by the culture. They were sad that the towering trees of the same age as the republic or even older were felled; they were even more intolerant of such decisions being made by a handful of GDP-oriented urban construction officials. If in the 1990s, faced with rows of fallen trees, citizens had no choice but to ridicule officials like “Wang Wulong”, then today, with the ubiquity of the Internet, a self-organizing, low-cost, responsive, and interventionist tree conservation campaign had indeed stopped the hand of indiscriminate cutting. Although the March 19 tree protection movement was quickly dispersed, and the “green review” work was, to a large extent, just a “show of democracy”, I remember that over the course of a week, many underage children followed their young mothers to the movement, and their little faces

The peer group 63 flushed with the chill of spring and passion—let me believe that once the door of democracy is opened, generations will flock to it.

The salon: building a society-shared governance via communication and interaction Although in this age the Internet is of great significance in the construction of civil society, and even been called “the largest special zone in transitional China” (Xiong, 2010: 282), it is clear that in a country of great change and transformation, such special zones are not limited to the Internet. In terms of our theme of the peer group here, the Habermas-style public sphere, in which young people participate and thus acquire knowledge, dialogue, and practical ability, also includes “salon”. Although the word “salon” here is not the same as that which came into the French from the Italian in the 17th and 18th centuries, in that the latter was a social place derived from the luxurious sitting room of an aristocratic family, I refer to the public domain where a group of young people mainly participate in discussions around a certain public topic, which, after all, inherits the tradition of kindred spirits and free conversation. This is the reason why Habermas regarded the early salon as an extension of the private sphere of the citizen family (Habermas, 1962: 54). From this point of view, the communication and interaction in the salon or public sphere is obviously conducive to promoting the enlightenment and construction of civil society or the co-governance society. In China, the earliest salons were introduced by intellectuals studying abroad in the 1930s, one of the most famous was the “Star Six Party” hosted by Lin Huiyin at 3–1 Zongbu Hutong, Beijing. Besides Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin, there were also a large number of cultural elites such as Xu Zhimo, Jin Yuelin, Zhang Xiruo, Hu Shi, and Shen Congwen, as well as Mr. and Mrs. Fairbank, who later became “China experts”. It is said that an equally famous salon at the same time was the “Poetry Reading Meeting” hosted by Zhu Guangqian at No. 3 Cihuidian, Di’an Gate in Beijing. For more than half a century, war and political repression squeezed the more or less romantic salons out of Chinese daily life. Except for the “underground art salon” of Li Li and Xu Haoyuan during the Cultural Revolution that we mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, this embryonic public sphere was completely erased not only from the structure of Chinese society but also from the memory of the people. This naturally leads to the fact that when the reform and opening-up started, the only remaining idealism under political pressure turned the 1980s into a new peak of “salon culture”. So much so that many years later, Li Tuo, a trendsetter of the salon in the 1980s, would say with regret, One of the characteristics of the 1980s was that everyone had passion. What passion? Not just any passion, but a passion to carry on. Everyone had such an ambition. . . . There were also parties and dinners, but the real attraction was the discussion of so many issues in politics, philosophy, and literature. (Zha, 2006: 252–256)

64 The peer group However, the “bookstore salon” or “book bar” that appeared after the mid2000s was the first salon with the nature of a modern public sphere or civil society, because only from then on did dialogue begin to be a distinct feature of the bookstore salon. In January 2006, the “One-way Street” bookstore set up by Xu Zhiyuan and others became a banner of the bookstore salon. From the start, One-way Street positioned itself not only as a bookstore, but also as a “public space”. It declared with unprecedented candor: “‘One-way Street’ is dedicated to providing a public space for intellectual, ideological and cultural life.” In fact, the public space of One-way Street is not composed of the bookstore, but by the salons held regularly by it on weekends. Since the speech of the poet Xi Chuan on March 5, 2006, more than ten years ago, One-way Street bookstore has held more than 1,000 salons, invited more than 1,200 speakers, and the audience has reached 150,000 people. Mo Yan, Chen Danqing, Bai Xianyong, Yan Geling, Tian Qinxin, Jia Zhangke, Lai Shengchuan, Chai Jing, Liang Wendao, Zhang Yueran, Shi Hang, Luo Yijun, Li Yinhe, Feng Tang, Yu Xiuhua, Ji Di, Fan Ye, Kato Yoshikazu, Zhang Ming, Liu Yu, Ye Fu and others have hosted the One-way Street salon, and the topics are multifarious: from art to life, from tradition to postmodernism, from the Qing dynasty to the Republic of China, from public life to the private sector, from life to faith. Of course, with topics ranging from political reform to free speech to personal life, One-way Street salon topics are not always suave, and often contain groundbreaking boldness, which no wonder causes excessive attention from the “authorities concerned”. Zhang Jiping, a reporter from Asia Weekly in Hong Kong, once listened to a “speech” given by Xiong Peiyun, a young scholar, and Kato Yoshikazu, a Japanese student: “How can individuals transform society?” The scheduled lecture time was less than half an hour, but more than 200 participants spent two hours discussing with each other, which fully reflects the public space nature of One-way Street: When Xiong Peiyun said that more important than facing the society is facing the heart, immediately a woman in the audience stood up and retorted. She said, in a mournful tone, that it was cowardice, and that how you could do nothing about the injustice of society. Xiong Peiyun also said that the transformation of the world can only start from the transformation of their own: “There are no enemies in the heart, only those whom you want to help.” Another male listener stood up in support of Xiong Peiyun. And then they moved on. More people were telling their personal stories and worrying about social realities. Some mentioned petitioning, others talked about political reform, and still others said they were “transformed” from childhood to adulthood. Every weekend, seven or eight salons focused on civic issues are held in different parts of the city at the same time, every one of which is attended by about a hundred people. There are at least seven or eight cafes where documentaries are screened and discussed at the same time. In addition to social issues, salons also involve reading clubs, horoscopes, spirituality, science and

The peer group 65 technology, and office politics – holding more life-oriented public salons has become the most fashionable choice for cafes. (Zhang, 2010) If you want to keep going, Beijing’s Sanwei Book Store, Chuan Zhixing, UCCA, Yulan Book Store, Shanghai’s Read and Digest, Waitan Forum, Guangzhou’s Concave Bar, New Media Women’s Salon, Chengdu’s Cottage Reading Club, and Nanjing’s Pioneer Forum all have become local popular folk salon landmarks. The most important feature of these folk salons is that in addition to the people involved in free discussion, the theme directly concerns society. The participants are also mostly young college students or white-collar workers fresh out of college, who have not only a strong sense of social participation, but also considerable communication skills. This determines that, although speakers are often eloquent “public intellectuals” such as Chen Danqing, Mo Yan, He Weifang, Zhang Ming, Liang Wendao, Zhu Tianwen, Ye Fu, Yu Jianrong, Zhang Yihe, and Qian Wenzhong, the active communication and interaction of salon participants endow it with the nature of a public space. This makes the salon no longer one of pure “enlightenment”, nor one of simple “preaching”, but a construction in the modern sense—mutual construction. In discussing the various new structures of modern European cities, Habermas repeatedly emphasized the special role of cafes and salons in the formation of civil society. These new institutions, while different, had the same social function in Britain and France, where coffee houses flourished between 1680 and 1780, and the salon between the regency period and the French Revolution. Everywhere, they were centers of literary criticism first, political criticism second. In the course of criticism, an educated middle class, somewhere between aristocratic society and civic intellectuals, began to form (Habermas, 1962: 37). The extent to which China’s cafes and salons will contribute to the growth of the middle class and further promote the formation of civil society or community society is not yet known, but in these spaces open to the public, general issues or so-called public topics related to human civilization or dignity are subject to discussion or even controversy, which will undoubtedly promote people’s consideration of these issues, and also form a common sense of style and responsibility in such discussions. Obviously, as a result of this discussion or controversy, public opinion will not only affect or restrict individuals in their social lives, but also exert some influence or restriction on the executive side of public power. For example, while all agree that the state is too powerful in China, squeezing social space and muzzling public opinion, one can see that, in 2003, it was the extensive media coverage of the “Sun Zhigang case” and the great discussion about the “detention and repatriation system” it triggered that led to the abolition of the system, which had been in place for more than half a century, in three months.13 In 2012, another university student, Ren Jianyu, also attracted wide attention online and in the media.14 Under the continuous fermentation of public opinion, Guangming Net stated bluntly,

66 The peer group Ren Jianyu case makes people feel the necessity of abolishing the reeducation through labor system again. It is safe to say that as long as the system of reeducation through labor violates basic legal principles, the so-called “mishandled” re-education through labor decisions like Ren Jianyu’s case will not disappear. (Guangming.com Commentator, 2012) It was against this background that the Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee made the decision to “abolish the system of re-education through labor” (CPC Central Committee, 2013: 53) in order to conform to public sentiment. Aware of this, you can understand why Habermas said: Sometimes, the public sphere is the field of public opinion, which directly confronts the public authority (Habermas, 1962: 2). Similarly, we can naturally regard the public sphere as a bridge or transition between civil society and the state. The reason why we pay so much attention to the construction of the public sphere is that the corresponding society or civil society in China has not been developed and grown for a long time. Historically, “civilian government” has been a classic Chinese expression of state–society relations. As a result, “the ‘folk’ people in China hardly believe that it is possible to establish a benign interactive relationship between the society and the state” (Gan, 1998: 34). In reality, China after 1949 is a totalitarian or highly centralized country. Therefore, for a long time, “the state’s strong control over society” has been the main narrative line of the western Chinese research circle about China in the Mao Zedong era (Zhou, 2010). However, since the reform and opening-up in 1978, the withdrawal or “delegation” of state power from many areas of grass-roots society, and the reforms in various economic and political fields, including the contract responsibility system, villagers’ self-governance, fostering private enterprise, fostering communities, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), provided society with unprecedented vitality. People began to look forward to fostering a civil society or co-governance society in China as soon as was possible. What we call a civil society can also be called a society in a narrow sense, referring to the civil sphere corresponding to the state or its agents. It is made up of citizens and the various civic organizations and communities that citizens spontaneously form, so it needs a social “self-organizing” environment and the ability of citizens to self-organize. Such societies can be called “co-governance societies”, which generally includes the following basic characteristics. First, individual standards, that is to say, citizens have the ability to act independently above the modern social system. Second, the spirit of autonomy, which is associated with the individual standard. Citizens have a strong sense of responsibility for their words, deeds, and social affairs, and can exercise their rights according to law and manage themselves through various social organizations. Third, the concept of public welfare, including the charity, volunteer, and mutual aid spirit. Fourth, corporatism, that is, citizens actively participate in social life and social affairs through various associations. Fifth, the principle of the legal system, where civil society is built on the basis of the legal system,

The peer group 67 and all kinds of social relations (including the relations between citizens, citizens and societies, and societies and governments) are strictly contractual. Finally, the private domain and public domain. Civil society includes the “private domain” established on the basis of the market economy and social differentiation, and the “public domain” where citizens can influence national policies through the exchange and expression of opinions (Huang, 2002). Here, we have spent a lot of time discussing whether the salon or cafe is such a public domain. From the above analysis of the facts, it can be seen that a small salon or cafe not only creates a public sphere where opinions can be exchanged and expressed, but in fact also cultivates a lot of modern civic awareness and capacity for action through active interaction between the participants, especially the young participants who are the majority, such as the individual standard, the spirit of autonomy, the concept of public welfare, corporatism, and the principle of law mentioned above. Although there is no shortage of eloquent speakers in salons and cafes, as we have pointed out, because these public areas have procedures that limit the speaker’s control of the interactive process (i.e., no more than half an hour), empowering all listeners to participate, so the roles of speaker and audience are relative and changeable. With this in mind, given that the participants are basically what we now call the post-70s, post-80s, or post-90s generation, we can think of these public spheres as a very special kind of communal public space for peer groups, where the beginnings of a community society are taking shape in China. Further, new integrations and alliances are quietly taking place between this kind of real space and virtual space, such as the Internet. What happens in a small salon or cafe, like “Co-China” in Hong Kong, radiates through the Internet and has an even more incredible impact. It makes it possible that the cultivation of a modern co-ruling society may progress in China at an unexpected speed. Whether it is online posts or salon gatherings, all this happens in the form of peer group interaction that the older generation never experienced. With all this, we have come to understand to some extent how today’s younger generation has acquired the ability to nurture their parents and even their grandparents. But that is clearly not the whole answer. In fact, so far, although we have discussed the subtlety of the Internet, we have not fully explained the influence and power of the whole mass media, including but not limited to the Internet. We will see how the rapid development of the media in mainland China from 1978 to 2020 and the resulting wave of information and knowledge ultimately has subverted the intergenerational relationship of the entire society and made the younger generation the undisputed trendsetter or bellwether of a country that has embraced tradition for centuries.

Notes 1 It must be admitted that in the early Red Guard rebellion, the strong consciousness of “factionalism” disintegrated the complete intergenerational consciousness or group consciousness of the younger generation. At that time, the Red Guards belonging to different factions fought fiercely for Mao Zedong and Mao Zedong’s thought, something which they all fought to the death to defend. But the experience of going to the countryside after 1968 changed all that.

68 The peer group 2 In fact, the most famous “educated youth novel” is Zhang Yang’s The Second Handshake, because it describes the fate of returning intellectuals, which we do not discuss here. Also, interestingly, in the 1970s no one would have thought that Baiyangdian, where “dragons” and “tigers” lurk, would become the cradle of “underground poetry”. In addition to the above several “educated youth” poets, Bei Dao, Jiang He, and Gan Tiesheng, who were also famous “underground poets”, visited Baiyangdian successively (Yang, 1993: 108). Considering that these people were, in fact, the nucleus of the unofficial literary publication Today that emerged during the Beijing spring, we do have reason to believe that these underground or semi-underground gatherings or encounters set the stage for the new literature that emerged in 1978 as a result of changes in the political environment (Bonnin, 2004: 334). 3 “The song of the educated youth in Nanjing”, also known as “The song of the educated youth in China”, was written by Ren Yi of the educated youth in Nanjing. Today’s young people don’t understand how such a simple nostalgic song could have led to the writer being nearly sentenced to death (later sentenced to ten years in prison) during the Mao era. More than 40 years later, my friend X, who was on the scene of the sentencing meeting, still gasps at the horror of that era. 4 Erickson’s own early life history provides a realistic proof of the relationship between identity and early life, and facilitates the psychoanalyst’s creative research on identity or identity crisis. Erickson grew up with a sense of not belonging to his family, which was exacerbated by the fact that his mother and stepfather were Jewish, but he was tall, blue-eyed, and blond, of Scandinavian origin. At school he was called a Jew, but at his stepfather’s ancestral temple he was called a heretic. 5 According to the view of Edward P. Thompson, class consciousness is a class and its members’ consciousness of their own economic, political status, and social belonging; but class consciousness is not necessarily a direct reflection of the objective economic state, it is also a way of cultural formation. Specifically, a class is created when a group of people, drawing conclusions from a common experience (whether derived from their predecessors or from their own experience), feel and clearly state that they have common interests and that their interests are different from (and often opposed to) those of others (Thompson, 2001, Vol. I: 2). 6 “Substitution”, in which adult children take over their parents’ jobs, was often made at the expense of younger parents having to retire early. The policy of substitution was applied before 1966 to families who were in difficulties due to the early death of their parents. In 1978, at the beginning of the reform and opening-up, it began to be widely adopted in cities when a large number of educated youth and “decentralized families” returned to the cities, making career arrangements more difficult. 7 As for the history of the Western, mainly European universities, I should like to thank Professor Walter Ruegg, former President of the University of Frankfurt, Germany, and chairman of the Permanent Conference of European University presidents, for the generous gift of his edited History of European Universities. In November 2008, when I went to the University of Hamburg, Germany, for an international conference on “1968: German Universities: Historical Context, Events and Implications”, knowing that I, a sociologist from China, would be attending the conference, Professor Ruegg, then 90 years old, handed me the first two volumes of the published History of European Universities in Chinese which he had carried all the way from his home in Switzerland, and showed great interest in my lectures on the Red Guard movement of 1966–1968. Although in the first volume of the History of European Universities, Professor Ruegg questioned whether the University of Bologna was founded in 1088, here I am going to use the Bologna authorities’ version of the date. In fact, as a prominent sociologist, Professor Ruegg has also realized that the University of Bologna, the mother of European universities, has an unparalleled political and symbolic function (Ruegg, 2007, Vol. I: 5).

The peer group 69 8 According to the data of the sixth census conducted in 2010, compared with the 2000 census, the number of people with college education increased from 3,611 to 8,930, the number of people with high school education increased from 11,146 to 14,032, the number of people with junior middle school education increased from 33,961 to 38,788, and the number of people with primary school education decreased from 35,701 to 26,779 (Ma, 2011). This suggests that in just ten years, as the number of years of education has increased, young Chinese have been entering the work force much later. 9 The reason for the decline of school tradition or influence lies not only in the decline of the supremacy of teachers in the electronic age due to the diversity of information sources, but also in the decline of the frequency of teacher–student interaction. In the past four decades, with the rapid growth of higher education in China, the ratio of teachers to students has been increasing. In the 1990s, when Professor Pei Xiansheng, a journalism professor, saw nearly a thousand students in my social psychology class, he once lamented that in the late 1940s, “when I was in college, only three students were enrolled in my major that year”. Obviously, the results of teacher–student interaction of 1 to 3, 1 to 100, and 1 to 1,000 are not the same. 10 In the past, according to Negroponte, proximity was the basis of everything from friendship and cooperation to games and neighborhood. Today’s children are completely unconstrained by geography. Digital technology can become a natural motivator to draw people into a more harmonious world (Negroponte, 1995: 271). 11 The cable broadcasting in Mao Zedong’s time is a typical example of this kind of strong “narrator’s discourse”. People who know about cable broadcasting know that there was no switch available for personal control in the terminal of each house. Not only what you listened to was determined by the “superiors”, but when you listened to it was also determined by them. Except for a few intellectuals who were relatively independent of the control of the village, the local farmers dared not take the risk of cutting off the cable broadcasting (Zhou, 1998a: 218). 12 In 1990, Li Anyou and Shi Tianjian conducted a nationwide survey of political behaviors and attitudes in China, and the results showed that respondents’ perceptions of the influence of the government, the role of the system, and their tolerance of dissidents were all lower. However, “low awareness of the influence of the government and the role of the system, as well as less tolerant attitudes, may become roadblocks to democratization” (Guo, 2003: 110). 13 In March 2003, Sun Zhigang, a college student who had just found a job in Guangzhou, was taken into a shelter as a “social drifter” by the authorities, where he was beaten to death on May 20. “The death of Sun Zhigang” triggered extensive discussion and doubt on the detention and repatriation system once it was reported by the media. On May 14, three law doctors, Yu Jiang, Teng Biao, and Xu Zhiyong, submitted a proposal to the standing committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC) on examining the measures for the detention and repatriation of urban vagabonds and beggars, arguing that the restrictions on citizens’ personal freedom contained in the measures contradict the Chinese constitution and relevant laws and should be changed or revoked. On May 23, 2003, five famous jurists, He Weifang, Sheng Hong, Shen Kuikui, Xiao Han, and He Haibo, jointly submitted a letter to the standing committee of the NPC on behalf of Chinese citizens, requesting the launch of a special investigation procedure concerning Sun Zhigang’s case and the implementation of the detention and repatriation system. On June 20 of the same year, Premier Wen Jiabao of the state council of the People’s Republic of China signed the decree of the state council, promulgating the “Measures for Relief and Management of Vagrants and Beggars Who Have No Means to Live in the City”. The promulgation of the measures marked the abolition of the “Measures for Reception and Repatriation of Vagrants and Beggars in the City”.

70 The peer group 14 Ren Jianyu, a college student village official in Chongqing, was sentenced to two years of reeducation through labor in 2011 for copying, forwarding, and commenting on “more than 100 negative messages” on Tencent Microblog and QQ Spaces. A year later, against the backdrop of the fall of Bo Xilai, the commission reversed its decision and Ren Jianyu was freed. One of the surprising details in Ren’s case was that a T-shirt printed with the slogan “Give me liberty or give me death” that his girlfriend bought online for him became one of the most important pieces of evidence that the defendant, Chongqing Reeducation Through Labor Commission, argued that Ren was guilty. Recalling how Scottish–American Patrick Henry’s famous saying “Give me liberty or give me death” inspired many people with great ideals to follow one another during the years when the Chinese people fought for freedom and liberation, it is really a shock to learn that after 30 years of reform and opening-up, some people in Chongqing under Bo Xilai were even convicted of this crime, which fully illustrates the essence of Bo’s political line, and how significant it is for the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) to list such values as freedom, democracy, and equality as the core values of socialism.

3

The media More about survival than information

I have thought all day long, but found that it is not as fruitful as a moment of learning; I have stood on tiptoe to look far, but found that it is better to climb to the top to see more. A man who reaches a height and waves does not lengthen his arms, but is seen at a distance; if a man calls along with the wind, even if his voice is not louder than before, the listener can hear clearly. Those who use chariots and horses can travel thousands of miles without walking fast; those who use boats can cross rivers, not necessarily being able to swim. So the nature of the gentleman is no different from that of the average man, except that the gentleman is good at using external things. Xuncius, 2011 Computing is not about computers any more. It is about living. Nicholas Negroponte

The significance of the media Following our discussion of peer groups, the analysis of the influence of mass media on the cultural feedback ability of the younger generation reminds us of David Riesman, the sociologist who became famous throughout the United States in the 1950s, mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 2 of this book. In his later classic, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, Riesman vividly compared the influence of peer groups and mass media on the changing American character: The peer-group stands midway between the individual and the messages which flow from the mass media. The mass media are the wholesalers; the peer-groups, the retailers of the communications industry. But the flow is not all one way. Not only do the peers decide, to a large extent, which tastes, skills, and words, appearing for the first time within their circle, shall be given approval, but they also select some for wider publicity through contiguous groups and eventually back to the mass media for still wider distribution. (Riesman et al., 2001: 84) DOI: 10.4324/9781003024309-3

72 The media Riesman’s thinking is clear. Firstly, peer groups and mass media interact with each other, which cannot be achieved by a single factor. Secondly, if the peer group as a “retailer” has the function of “acceptance” and “selection”, then the mass media as a “wholesaler” has the function of “spreading” and “promotion” which the peer group cannot compare with. The spreading and promotion ability of mass media determines its powerful shaping and influence on social life. Back in 1916, before the advent of radio, television, and the Internet, the mass media that would later transform the world, John Dewey, an educator at the University of Chicago, wrote with confidence that society exists not only through communication, but also, we can boldly say, in communication (Dewey, 1916: 5). Although there is no evidence that Harold Innis, who later became famous in communications, took Dewey’s course when he was a student in Chicago, he did inherit Dewey’s ideas, and together with Marshall McLuhan preached the influence of the media on society all his life. Innis and McLuhan creatively put the history of the mass media at the center of the whole history of civilization. Both of them regard it not only as a technological appendage of society, but also as a crucial determinant of social structure (Carey, 1967). This view of what Everett M. Rogers called “technological determinism” was later widely criticized: that a technology was often embedded in a social structure, which affected its invention, development, and diffusion, as well as its affect on society. In other words, technology was influenced by society, not the other way around. But Rogers may be more fair here in fact. This social embedding of technology does not condemn the fact that technology may be a force for social change, though it is not the only force (Rogers, 1994: 510). If technology, especially communication technology or the media as discussed here, is not regarded as the only driving force of social change, we can really understand social change from the side of media development, and thus further understand the significance of the media to human social progress. Table 3.1 is a global communication development timeline based on various research works and institutional reports on the history of human communication. It roughly describes the great media events and their processes that have had an important impact on human communication during the 5,000 years of human civilization. In order to simplify the description of the progress of human media, in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan, through the change of media and the extension of the human senses, divided the forward history of human society into three stages: tribalization, non-tribalization, and retribalization. In the primitive days of wandering and hunting, when man perceived the world as a whole and intuitively, he could neither analyze nor concentrate; he was a whole man, or a tribesman. Next, because of the division of labor and the invention of writing, especially the Pinyin, man learned to analyze, and at the same time made himself a fragmented and incomplete nontribesman. Mechanical printing and the whole industrial civilization pushed non-tribalization to the extreme. Further, with the advent of the electronic age, the way people perceived the world was no longer just visual, literal, and linear.

Table 3.1 Global media development timeline Events Related to Media Development In 100, began the development of papermaking in China and its spread in Asia and the Arab world up until AD 600 In 170 the Arabs introduced Chinese papermaking to the West In 1000 came the invention and use of clay type printing in China In 1400 came the development of metal type printing in Asia In 1456, the German Gutenberg perfected metal movable-type printing and printed the Bible by hand In 1600 the world’s first “newspapers” appeared in Germany, France, and Belgium In 1702, the Daily News of London became the first daily newspaper Mass media began in 1833 with the publication of the New York Sun, the first penny newspaper In 1837, the telegraph was first demonstrated In 1839, Daguerre invented photography In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell spoke on the telephone for the first time In 1879, Edison invented the electric lamp In 1884, Eastman perfected the film In 1894, moving pictures were produced, and people saw movies for the first time In 1895, Marconi broadcast a radio message In 1920, the first regular radio station was established in Pittsburgh, USA In 1927, the first feature-length film with a soundtrack, the Jazz Singer, was released In 1933, the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) first experimented with television In 1937, the first digital computer was created with telephone parts In 1941, the first commercial television station broadcast programs In 1946, the first large computer was developed at the University of Pennsylvania In 1949, television networks appeared in the United States In 1956, tape recorders came out In 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first communications satellite In 1958, China Central Television (CCTV) began to broadcast officially In 1961, the first cable television connection was made between San Diego and Los Angeles In 1969, on the basis of ARPANET of the Pentagon Advanced Research Institute, the first Internet network was established In 1970, video cassette recorders (VCRs) were introduced In 1973, Motorola made the first call on a small mobile phone In 1975, American engineer Henry Roberts built the first personal computer, the Altair, which became the basis for the Apple I. The first commercially successful personal computer Apple II came out; at the same time, home theater (HBO) began distributing programs via satellite to cable systems In 1982, CDs went on sale In 1987, mobile phones began to be used in China, with 3,200 people becoming early adopters In 1990, the Internet began to present various types of data with a simple and friendly user interface In 1994, the first network television (that is, television programs broadcast via the Internet) appeared, and the “Education and scientific research demonstration network” in Zhongguancun, Beijing, China was officially connected to the Internet In 1997, DVDs came out In 1998, digital televisions came out In 1999, mp3s made music downloads possible, while computer viruses were rampant In 2000, Napster made music downloads easier (Continued )

74 The media Table 3.1 (Cont.) Events Related to Media Development In 2001, satellite-based digital audio broadcasting services began to increase In 2006, the number of landlines in mainland China peaked at 368 million and has since fallen In 2008, mobile phones were used by 4 billion people worldwide, accounting for 61% of the world’s population. Meanwhile, 23 of the world’s 6.7 billion people had Internet access In 2009, the total number of Internet users in mainland China reached 384 million, and the penetration rate reached 28.9%, exceeding the world average for the first time In 2010, the iPhone3 and 4, developed by Apple, and the iPod, a tablet computer, were introduced. The number of mobile phone users in China reached 805 million, while the number of landlines dropped to 305 million In December 2013, the Chinese mainland had 632 million Internet users, with a penetration rate of 46.9% Sources: Crowley and Heyer (1991), USAID (2008), Croteau and Hoynes (2009), ITU (2009), State Council Information Office (2010), China Internet Network Information Center (2010, 2015:15)

Thus, “after three thousand years of specialist explosion and of increasing specialism and alienation in the technological extensions of our bodies, our world has become compressional by dramatic reversal”. That is to say, it became a “global village” and achieved a higher level of retribalization (Rogers, 1994: 22). Despite criticism of McLuhan’s theory, the concept of “global village” has spread and become one of the world’s most fashionable buzzwords. In 1999, Paul Levinson further separated the concept of a global village into three parts, dividing the world after the emergence of electronic media into children’s villages, voyeurs’ villages, and earth villages according to the different social participation abilities provided to the public by media in different times. In historical order, in the small pre-agrarian villages, people had almost equal access to information, and every villager could hear the peddler’s voice at the entrance to the village. The advent of the written word and printing expanded the scope of communication, but changed the way humans communicate in two ways. On the one hand, printing destroyed the synchronicity of human communication. All people did not read books or newspapers at the same time. On the other hand, printing also destroyed the interactivity of human communication, so villagers could no longer directly ask peddlers questions. With the advent of electronic media, synchronization was restored, but neither radio nor television has been able to restore the instant feedback and interaction between the shopping “villagers” and the “peddler”. Broadcasting was the voice of paternalism, and the public, like children in a family, could only listen and not speak; Levinson realized the similarities between Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, and Roosevelt: They had successfully used the power of broadcasting to “instill”.1 Television turned the audience from children into peepers: People saw more intuitive and

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reliable pictures and became more rational, although they still did not have the right to make their voices heard. Interactivity was restored with the advent of the Internet. At this point, millions of people began to actively talk online, and individual citizens were no longer what Lippmann calls “deaf bystanders in the back”; instead, they have access to most of the information about most things and are free to react to that information. Thus, the Internet transformed (McLuhan’s) global village from a metaphor to a near-reality (Levinson, 2001: 103, 97). From Table 3.1 and the description of McLuhan and Levinson, we can roughly outline the great progress of the media revolution in human history. The first media revolution was the emergence of language, which made it possible for human beings to communicate and think, and thus provided tools for human beings to interact face to face, further enabling them to form the primitive clan society on the basis of blood relationship. The second media revolution was the emergence of the written word. As we have said in the previous chapter, the emergence of written language makes up for the inconvenience of communication caused by body language and oral language, “thus separating the spoken from the speaker, and making possible conceptual discourse” (Castells, 2010a: 355). More importantly, writing created a new communication order and established new social relations. On the one hand, writing enables human communication to break through the limitations of regions and expand the scope of human communication; on the other hand, because of the meaning of privacy provided by writing, it promotes the privatization of social communication and enables individuals to establish their own social networks centered on their own production and life. The third media revolution was the invention and promotion of printing. “The message of the print and of typography is primarily that of repeatability. With typography, the principle of movable type introduced the means of mechanizing any handicraft by the process of segmenting and fragmenting an integral action” (McLuhan, 1994: 204). The fourth media revolution was the emergence of electronic media. From the end of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century, the emergence and popularization of mass media represented by telegraph, film, radio, and television throughout the world made a historic breakthrough in the audio-visual culture of mankind. “The explosion of communication brought about the transformation of social communication from closed to open, from dependence to autonomy, and from monism to diversity, thus bringing about a more complete revolution in social relations” (Meng, 2010). In fact, the climax of this revolution was the Internet revolution based on the computer technology popularized after the 1980s. It has completely changed the means of human communication and once again highlighted the significance of media to human beings. There is a great deal of discussion about the significance of media to human beings, which can be summarized in two aspects: psychological cognition and social structure. In terms of human psychology or cognition, the significance of media is most importantly reflected in two aspects. First, in a deep sense, the

76 The media medium is not just the means or carrier of information transmission, but, as McLuhan said, the medium is the message itself (McLuhan, 1994: 39). That is to say, different media not only take other media as the content of their communication (for example, text is the content of printing, while printing is the content of telegraph), but also determine the means and clarity of the human perception of information due to its nature; they also determine or shape the cognitive structure of the human perception of information. When people listen to music, it is easy to understand, because the melody they hear is both the style and the content of music. The same is true of other media, which makes our understanding of certain media at least to a certain extent determined by their nature. Second, on the surface, different media extend and expand the range of human perception and cognition in different ways, so McLuhan would say that “all media are extensions of our own bodies and senses” (McLuhan, 1994: 116). For example, a telegraph or radio is an extension of our ears, a film or television is an extension of our eyes, and an electronic computer or network is an extension of our central nervous system.3 Such extensions not only makes the distance between people and things or information shorter and shorter, but also makes the distance between people shorter and shorter, and we know that this is exactly the premise of the global village. In this sense, the history of media is actually the history of narrowing the distance between human beings. Since the telegraph was invented by Morse in 1844 and the telephone was invented by Bell in 1876 we see humans getting closer

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Fixed telephone lines Mobile telephone subsriptions

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Figure 3.1 Development of global information communication technologies, 1998–2008 ITU (2009: 3)

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and closer to each other, but it was the Internet (based on computer technology) we mentioned in Chapter 5 of the first volume of this book and the first call of the small mobile phone made by Motorola in 1973 that made the distance disappear. Since then, new information technologies have swept the world at lightning speed (Castells, 2010b: 38). Especially in the last decade of the 20th century, information and communication technology (ICT), which was based on mobile phones and the Internet, was developed rapidly. Figure 3.1 shows the statistics according to the “Measurement information society”, the 2009 report of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). By the end of 2008, the number of people using mobile phones had reached 4 billion, accounting for 61% of the world’s population (after 132 years of development, the total number of fixed telephone households is only 130 million). At the same time, nearly a quarter (23%) of the world’s 6.7 billion people have access to the Internet, and in developed countries the figure is even higher (ITU, 2009: 71). In fact, China, a country with a telephone penetration rate of only 0.45% (2.13 million) at the beginning of the reform and opening-up, is the best epitome of the development of new information technology “at lightning speed”. By June 2012, the number of fixed telephones in China had reached 285 million and the number of mobile telephones exceeded 1 billion (CNNIC, 2012). Furthermore, by the end of June 2014, the number of Internet users had reached 632 million, among which the number of mobile Internet users reached 527 million, surpassing traditional PC Internet users for the first time (CNNIC, 2015:12) (Figure 3.1). Compared with the influence of media on human psychological cognition, its influence on human society is more significant. We can discuss this effect from both macroscopic and microscopic dimensions. From a macro-perspective, because the media is a bridge to building social relations, and even a driving force for the transformation of social relations, it is quite natural that every media revolution introduces a new scale and changes social relations. To be specific, the emergence of language is adapted to the consanguinity society, while the emergence of writing is accompanied by the breaking up of the gens united by consanguinity. Further, although the invention and promotion of printing had only a mild influence in eastern society, it also promoted the differentiation of industries and classes, and the development of “business relationships” centered on trade, industry, chamber of commerce, and other elements. However, in the West, it has brought tremendous changes, breaking the domination of blood and geographical relations over personal relationship networks (Meng, 2010), and promoted the transformation of the human community from the “Gemeinschaft” or “custom society” mentioned by sociologists Tonnies and Fei Xiaotong to “Gesellschaft” or “legal-rational society” (Fei, 1998: 9; Tonnies, 1988). During the American Civil War, and later during the reform movement, the dominant form of print—newspapers—played an unprecedented progressive role (Zhou, 2006). Finally, electronic media, especially the network information technology popularized after the 1980s, has brought the whole world into an interactive network. At this point, the traditional concept of space and time is

78 The media broken, and anyone with “individual needs” and a “shared code of conduct” can connect via the Internet. This initiative has allowed Robin Dunbar’s “Rule of 150” to be expanded as never before, using the social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s “Six degrees of separation” theory: Anyone can theoretically connect with any other person in the world through a chain of six people (Ximen et al., 2009: 6–7).4 Most importantly, in cyberspace, we also form the fourth kind of human relationship after blood relationship, geographical relationship, and karma relationship—virtual social relationship. On the micro-level, the most prominent influence of media on human society is that it is a powerful tool to shape human modernity. Back in 1958, American social psychologist Daniel Lerner, in his book The Passing of Traditional Society, regards the relationship between the individual and the media as one of the basic elements of the theoretical framework that divides traditional people, transitional people, and modern people. More than a decade later, American social psychologists Alex Inkeles and David H. Smith, following Lerner’s basic train of thought, in a study of personal modernity in the six developing countries of Argentina, Chile, India, Israel, Nigeria, and Bangladesh, proposed a similar hypothesis regarding the relationship between the media and human modernity: A modern man should have more frequent access to the mass media, newspapers, radio, films, and television (if any). They are quite strongly convinced that, in evaluating different sources of information, more modern people will have greater confidence in the newer mass media and less modern people will rely more on more traditional sources (Inkeles & Smith, 1975: 37). Inkeles and Smith carefully designed the mass media scale, and divided people’s contact level with the media into seven levels. The lowest level 1 does not read the newspaper or listen to the radio, and the highest level 7 does both. The results show that there is a close relationship between the increase of mass media contact and the increase of the score of the comprehensive modernity scale: In each of the six countries, for every level of advancement in the mass media, there is almost a roughly proportional increase in personal modernity. This common trend is also reflected in the strong zero-order correlation coefficient between comprehensive modernity and mass media. For the whole sample, its average correlation coefficient is 0.45 (Inkeles & Smith, 1975: 218). In fact, before Lerner and Inkeles, Yan Yangchu, a “folk educator” in China, realized that the media had a great influence on cultivating people’s modernity or “opening up people’s wisdom”; he started from Ding county in Hebei province and began to promote the rural construction movement to the whole country and even the world.5 Especially in the ten years from 1926 to 1936, Yan Yangchu led hundreds of elite intellectuals to launch a vigorous campaign of civilian education and rural construction in Ding county. In the ten years of the “Ding county experiment”, in order to improve the intelligence, productivity, strength, and solidarity of farmers and create a generation of “new people” (Song, 2012), the Chinese Association for the Promotion of Education for the Common People led by Yan Yangchu carried out a large number of pioneering communication practices, among which the most effective ones included the use

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of newspapers, radio, and drama. They taught peasants how to read newspapers and use them as their mouthpieces, established radio broadcasts covering several counties in the vicinity of Ding county to broadcast radio programs in local dialects and to teach farmers news, knowledge, and livelihood techniques, and even cultivated civilized behavior and public emotion adapted to the new life by organizing farmers to rehearse and watch the new plays with farmers in the leading roles. So many years later it is still recognized that “the mass media in the Ding county experiment is just such a liberating force, exerting its functions of spreading new knowledge, cultural entertainment and social coordination: It is not only a convenient tool to help farmers learn to read, but also an effective means to mobilize farmers, improve the social atmosphere, and promote rural modernization in Ding county, and also to create a favorable public opinion environment for the national rural construction movement” (Cao, 2005). Both Inkeles’s research and Yan Yangchu’s experiment demonstrate the social significance of media from different perspectives. As American communicator Wilbur Schramm said, the media are a liberating force, because they can break down barriers of distance and isolation and transport people from traditional society to the “great society” (Schramm, 1990: 134). Then we will see how the revolutionary development of mass media, including newspapers, radio, television, and the Internet, has gradually brought the younger generation from traditional China into the great society of contemporary China over the past four decades.

The impetus for social opening-up The influence of media, especially the modern mass media, on the whole society is not limited to re-establishing people’s social relations, nor is it limited to giving modern values and social behaviors to the masses immersed in tradition. Fundamentally, it will directly promote the openness of a society. In fact, it is only when a society moves from a closed society to an open one that it is possible to absorb the dynamic elements of foreign culture or publicize the local culture, break the previously solid social relations, change the behavior patterns that people have taken for granted, and finally regenerate a society with new vitality. In modern times, when Chinese society with deeply rooted traditions underwent unprecedented changes under the “impact of the West”, as we put it in the words of the American historian Cohen in Chapter 2 of the first volume of this book, then society became all-directional and open to the world (Cohen, 1989: 145). This all-round opening inevitably leads to a flood of new economic, political, social, cultural, educational, and gender concepts from the West. Both the “eastward advance” of these new concepts and their popularity in Chinese society are closely related to the popularity and promotion of mass media such as magazines, newspapers, books, dramas (civilized dramas), and broadcasting. The mass media has played an important role in the opening up of Chinese society and its transition to modernity.

80 The media Shiwu Newspaper, founded by the reformists Huang Zunxian, Wang Kangnian, and Liang Qichao after the Sino-Japanese war in 1896, is an example of how mass media plays an important role in promoting the opening-up of modern Chinese society. This political journal, written by Liang Qichao, aimed at the preservation of reform laws and setting up columns such as argumentations, oracles, recent events outside Beijing, and translations of overseas newspapers, serialized Liang Qichao’s “Reform of laws and regulations”, which lashed out against the conformism of feudal diehard groups, and generated great repercussions in Chinese society at the end of the Qing dynasty. Although Shiwu Newspaper lasted only two years and published only 69 issues in total, it not only promoted the reform movement politically, but also gave birth to the openness of the whole society and cultural changes. For example, it opposed the social reality and traditional value orientation, which subtly changed the values of officials and gentry. Scholars no longer regarded officiating as the only way out, and people no longer regarded associations as a political taboo. For another example, Shiwu Newspaper promoted great changes in the cultural market. From then on, self-run newspapers and publishing organizations of Chinese people broke the monopoly of outsiders on the dissemination of new learning. At the same time, the publication of works and translations on new learning led by Shiwu Newspaper formed a cultural market with the newspaper office as the core and from which it radiated to the whole country. For example, the modern values and nationalism advocated by Shiwu Newspaper also led to the large-scale improvement of traditional customs, the most prominent of which were the prohibition of foot binding and the promotion of female education. The Shanghai “Foot-binding-prohibition association”, located in the Shiwu Newspaper office, once collected donations and printed 20,000 copies of “Female learning songs” and 3,000 copies of “The simple story of literacy instead of foot binding”, which were distributed widely among its members, creating the social public opinion of female learning and foot unbinding, and the registered members of the “Foot-binding-prohibition association” in Shanghai alone reached 300,000 (Lv, 1994). In addition to Shiwu Newspaper, the emergence of many newspapers, publications, and broadcasts in the turbulent period of the late Qing dynasty and the early Republic of China all contributed to the opening of Chinese society’s politics and ethos. At that time, Beijing, Nanjing, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Hangzhou, and Shanghai, a metropolis in particular, often led the way. It was closely related to the developed industry and commerce and the rapid population movement there, but it was fundamentally driven by the increasingly developed communication media of modern times. Take the illustrated newspaper Good Friend, which was opened by Wu Liande in Shanghai in 1926 as an example. This “large, image-based, popular and cheap publication” (Li, 2002: 2) not only focused on current affairs, opened people’s wisdom, and carried forward culture, but also led the trend, advocated fashion, and influenced the general mood, becoming the most important and influential pictorial newspaper in China at that time. Every issue of Good Friend featured a portrait on the cover. Among

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the 172 issues of the magazine, only 11 were male, and the other 169 were all female, including Hu Die, Ruan Lingyu, Bai Yang, and Lu Xiaoman, most of whom were movie or sports stars, and a few were ladies. What is interesting is that this practice not only boldly broke through the Chinese tradition of women not leaving their homes, but also developed the public space of middle and upper-class women and influenced the colorful urban culture in Shanghai consumer society (Wu, 2009). For example, in the early days of Good Friend, the women not only wore traditional clothes, but also showed cuteness and affectation, but in the later days, the clothes and expressions of the cover figures became more and more “obviously signifying modernity” (Li, 2005: 80).7 These portraits “recommended a modern lifestyle to young women in Shanghai, instilled a new value concept, and stirred up a series of fashion trends” (Meng, 2005: 179), which affected the social opening of this metropolitan city. If the reform at the beginning of the last century, though violent, was confined to the south-east coastal cities and limited in scope, then the reform and opening-up that began after 1978 was not only more vigorous, but also broader in scope. What it formed was “a change not seen in 5,000 years”. In this “change”, ideological confrontation or thought liberation was hanging by a thread yet also thrilling, but each time it was promoted by the media to further emancipate the minds of the whole people. Ma Licheng and Ling Zhijun, political writers at the People’s Daily, summed up the 30 years of ideological confrontation into four big debates: (a) “Two whatevers” or reform and opening-up? (b) Planned economy or market economy? (c) Is the private economy a curse or a vitalizer? (d) Are there mistakes in China’s reforms? (Ma, 2008; Ma & Ling, 1998). For the sake of space, we will take the first two arguments discussed in Chapter 3 of the first volume of this book as examples. The first debate, in the years after Mao Zedong’s death, focused on “two whatevers”,8 the essence of which was that we could not turn over the case of “cultural revolution” or change any political decisions made in the Mao Zedong era. On May 11, 1978, Hu Fuming published “Practice is the only criterion for testing truth” in the Guangming Daily. Then, mainstream media, including the Guangming Daily, the People’s Daily, the PLA Daily, and the Xinhua News Agency, initiated and organized a discussion on “Practice is the only criterion for testing truth”. During the theoretical debate that lasted for half a year, more than 650 articles were published in various newspapers and magazines, and their influence went far beyond press and theoretical circles and involved all fields of the country, thus forming the climax of the first ideological liberation movement in contemporary China (Yin, 2007). More than a decade later, the “June fourth turbulence” of 1989 and the upheaval of 1990 in eastern Europe led those on the left to argue again that reform and opening-up would inevitably lead China to “peaceful evolution” towards capitalism. They also questioned whether China’s reform was capitalist or socialist. In 1991, Huangfu Ping published four signed articles in the Jiefang Daily. The articles not only proposed “break[ing] through the shackles of any kind of rigid way of thinking”, and “chang[ing] the whole situation through reform”, but also explicitly emphasized

82 The media that “we cannot simply equate the development of a social commodity economy and the socialist market with capitalism, and assume that market regulation is capitalism” (Ma & Ling, 1998: 172). These articles not only further expanded people’s awareness of reform and opening-up, but in fact caused the debate that contributed to Deng Xiaoping’s “southern tour speech” a year later (Ma, 2008: 154–157). At the age of 88, Deng Xiaoping once again endorsed reform and opening-up with his own actions. If every progress in the field of ideology is thrilling, then every opening in the field of daily life is more like a “quiet revolution”. Since the beginning of the reform and opening-up, with the opening of the country and the gradual development of the West wind, the songs, dances, paintings, novels, films, and works of art that we used to think of as exclusively bourgeois, a vast variety of refreshing ideas in philosophy and the social sciences, as well as the entire material lifestyle including food, catering, clothing, electronics, and cosmetics, all poured into mainland China, becoming the object of desire of ordinary people, especially the younger generation. In the process of the introduction of these material and non-material civilizations, the increasingly prosperous and diversified mass media themselves played an important role. Although people have different opinions on this role, it is an accepted fact that the mass media has triggered unprecedented openness in Chinese society. Henry Bergson and Karl Popper believed that an open society should guarantee individual freedom and allow criticism from the masses; George Soros went further and said that in addition to having a democratic and efficient government, and regarding the promotion of freedom, democracy, the rule of law, human rights, social justice, and social responsibility as a universal concept, its most important foundation should be the recognition that any society is an imperfect society ready for improvement (Soros, 2002: 1, 140, 139). Although these expressions of “open society” have multiple political and social implications, in the context of the intergenerational relations we are discussing, it at least shows us that in a society that can be called “open”, no individual has any reason to reject new experience or oppose any attempt at social change, because this is the basic premise for improving social or individual imperfections. As the two social psychologists Inkeles and Smith, whom we have repeatedly quoted in this book, say, a modern person should be able to embrace the process of social change that is taking place around him, and more freely accept the changed opportunities that others are now enjoying. In a sense, he is not too stubborn and is not too anxious about others acting in new or unconventional ways (Inkeles & Smith, 1975: 26). The reason why the mass media can lead to the opening of a society and lead people to accept new things and social changes is that it can bring different values and attitude towards life, show different people’s ways of life, publicly display the different or even radically contradictory views of the same thing or event, show the imperfection of the society in which we live and the possibilities of transformation, encourage people to explore and debate the value and relevance of each possibility, and eventually make

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people accept or at least tolerate other values and lifestyles. In our study, through interviews with dozens of families, it was found that the convenience of access to the mass media makes the younger generation more open in values and lifestyle than their parents: I think children know more and are more receptive because of social development. For example, the development of mass media, such as newspapers, television, movies and the Internet, has led to a flood of information and reports, making them completely different from when we were young. When we were little, we couldn’t afford even newspapers, let alone TV. If you said you had newspapers in the home, for example the Beijing Daily or the Reference News, others must guess you were from a cadre family. The only insights we had as children came from wandering from one alley to another around home; at most, we were led by our grandparents to travel from east Beijing to west Beijing. How could we travel the world as children do today? Those children from well-off families can even go to a summer school abroad during the summer vacation, so, of course, they know more things than we do, and they are not as conservative as we are. You see, I sell health care products, but a lot of my information comes from my son BOB. He knows where to look for information, and happens to be an English major, so he not only helps me find Chinese materials, but sometimes also helps me translate English materials. He has also sent a lot of emails for me to get orders, and said that he will help me to build a sales website, which can sell through the Internet. If only. (BOM, 2004) In fact, the openness of a society is not only reflected in the fact that the younger generation is abler to accept new values and behavior patterns than their parents, but also in the fact that the older generation is able to tolerate the values and behavior patterns pursued by the younger generation even if they do not agree with them. Tolerance of the ideas and behaviors that one does not agree with or is unwilling to adopt is also a sign of the openness of a society, which, to a certain extent, also comes from the influence and promotion of the media. Obviously, a society with developed mass media will provide diversified channels for the expression and communication of different ideas and behaviors, and thus increase the understanding and tolerance of social members to various ideas and behaviors. Over the past four decades of reform and opening-up, Chinese people, including the elders, have gradually accepted the following principle: I may disagree with you, but I will defend to the death your right to say so. In this sense, the tolerance of the older generation in the face of a new set of values, life attitudes, or behaviors is sometimes an equal or even greater progress than the bold acceptance of the younger generation. In the interview in Guangzhou, a sociologist over 50 whom I know very well expressed basically the same view:

84 The media I think the media can bring a lot of things to our society that were not there before, and the biggest change it will make is that the tolerance of the society will increase. In theory, only when the society is more tolerant can it accept new things. I think this is probably the biggest change that has occurred as a result of the proliferation of media and information. A young person may not change the old person’s behavior easily, but the old person will become more tolerant, which is probably called “diversity”. More precisely, here by “diversity” I mean that I or the older generation can accept greater changes in society. This change may be the biggest change since the reform and opening-up, but it is not about who has changed whom or who has transformed whom. In other words, the fact that the elderly become more tolerant itself is a kind of social progress. (Interview with Cai, 2003) Cai He is right. From the perspective of intergenerational relations, one of the signs of whether a society is open or not is that different generations no longer complain or even hate each other, but tolerate each other. In general, of course, because much of the power or wealth of a society is in the hands of the older generation, it is often the older generation that makes a complaint or shows hostility, and the younger generation that receives it. Thus, when the elders of a society are able or willing to tolerate the bold words or actions of the young, even though they themselves would not accept such words and deeds, such words and deeds also have the possibility of gradually expanding or spreading in society, which will surely lay the foundation for its progress. At the beginning of the last century, the Dutch–American writer Willem van Loon wrote his later famous book Tolerance (Van Loon, 1985: 13). In van Loon’s works, the intolerance of modern society often stems from three aspects. First, out of laziness. People are unwilling to change their own concepts and lifestyles just because of habits, and therefore all people with new ideas become enemies of humanity. Next, out of ignorance. Because of ignorance, a person builds in his soul a fortress of granite, proclaiming himself infallible. Last, out of selfishness. Selfishness is often a sign of jealousy (Van Loon, 1985: 140–143). If we can seriously consider the function of the mass media, we can understand why it can promote tolerance of a society to a certain extent. Obviously, the mass media can break the habits or conventions of a society by spreading novel knowledge or other living habits, and can also make the ignorant become relatively wise through comparison. As for jealousy, although it is difficult to resolve by relying solely on the mass media, and it is also believed that there is no such thing as a society without jealousy,9 reasonable and effective communications can help people to appropriately suppress and channel envy by publicizing facts, suppressing differences, and building trust (Schoeck, 1988: 312). In any case, in a society where there is reasonable, just, and effective communication, people will have a sense of forgiveness and tolerance for others.

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Advertisements: to promote commodities or living styles? If the modern mass media establish a huge empire of symbols by sending speech, text, and especially image symbols to the rest of human society, then the advertisements we are going to discuss are called the “emperor” of this empire. Tao Dongfeng noticed that the living environment of human beings is being advertised on an unprecedented scale (Tao, 2006); in other words, in today’s society, advertising is an integral part of the rich world of experience in which we live. In the 1960s, American advertising scientists Raymond Bauer and Stephen Greyser proved through research that, on average, Americans encountered more than 300 advertisements a day (Bauer et al., 1968: 173–176). In the 1970s, this figure rose to 560 in Stuart Barrett’s survey (Britt, 1972); in Schulz’s study in the 1980s, however, this figure rose to more than 1,500 (Schultz, 1987: 124). Although we have not seen relevant data on China yet, no one can doubt that, since 1979, when the advertising business was re-granted a “birth permit” in China,10 along with the economic development and reform and opening-up of Chinese society, advertising has become omnipresent and unavoidable (Zhou, 1994: 7). In 1979, after China reintroduced commercial advertising, the annual turnover of advertising in mainland China was only 10 million RMB. But 40 years later, in 2019, the figure climbed to 867.4 billion CNY, the growth rate of which is far higher than that of the GDP in the same period, when China became the world’s leading advertising power after the United States. The reason why we say that advertising is the “emperor” in the symbol empire established by mass communication is not only because advertising is the most effective facility and technology to influence human behavior (Di et al., 1991: 216), but also because, in essence, the whole modern mass communication system is supported by advertising. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, when the modern advertising industry was just starting, the advertising revenue of American newspapers accounted for 64% of its total revenue (Wang & Su, 2006). In 2005, when China’s TV population reached 1.254 billion and became the largest TV country in the world (Chen & Yu, 2005), the advertising turnover of CCTV alone exceeded 8.6 billion CNY, accounting for nearly 70% of the total revenue of 12.4 billion CNY (Huang & Chen, 2006).11 So we can say, on the one hand, there would be no modern advertising without mass media. In many countries, advertising is the most important source of income for the media through which it is conducted. In addition to newspapers, magazines, and broadcast media, advertising media include direct mail, billboards and posters, transit advertising, the Internet, and promotional items such as matchbooks or calendars. Advertisers attempt to choose media that are favored by the advertisers’ target audience. (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1985, Vol. III: 524)

86 The media On the other hand, there would not have been such a developed mass communication system without modern advertising. Advertising, relying on its increasing income, provides a realistic possibility for the expansion and diversification of the mass media. Just as the influence of the mass media cannot be ignored, the influence of advertising as its core content is also of great significance. Even since advertising has essentially been a professional technique for producing persuasive messages (Di et al., 1991: 7), its influence is often greater than that of the general mass media because more intelligence and money are invested over the same time period. For this reason, the famous American historian David Porter admitted that the social influence of modern advertising can rival that of churches and schools with a long tradition (Ogilvy, 1991: Preface); Mark Poster, another historian, even saw advertising not as an economic event, but as a sociological event that told or participated in the ongoing game of forces in the social field (Poster, 2000: 67). The reason why Poster regarded advertising as a social and political event is based on the two basic characteristics of modern society. For one, television is becoming more and more popular, and watching it is one of the most time-consuming social activities after work and sleep.12 For another, almost all social groups watch advertisements on TV, especially children, the elderly, and housewives (Poster, 2000: 70, 67). In fact, no sociologist or even an advertising scientist would be so naive as to think that advertising’s influence on the public is limited to shopping. The reason why people sigh that “the air we breathe is composed of oxygen, nitrogen and advertisements” (Huang, 1998: 348) is that advertisements have been comprehensively embedded into human daily life and become one of the most important social and cultural factors shaping people’s beliefs, values, and lifestyles. If the impact of advertising on people’s daily lives is an indisputable fact, it is true that, as Poster said, its impact on different statistical groups is not the same. For the younger generation we are talking about here, the reason why they are more concerned about advertising and more receptive to its influence than the older generation is, on the one hand, because children have a keen interest in new and different stimuli, have no instinctive repulsion, and are often open to anything foreign. And, as we have discussed in the previous chapter, peer groups have a distinct tendency to imitate, and almost all smarter businesses know that “teena and her teenmates come in bunches, like bananas . . . sell one, and the chances are you’ll sell them all” (Savage, 2007: 452). On the other hand, since the end of World War II, the whole of modern industry and commerce, which mainly focuses on fashion manufacturing, has been coveting teenagers for a long time. They realized the stimulating effect of this age group on the post-war market and successfully transformed the teenager from a restless group to a consumer group through overwhelming commodity advertisements. The power of consumption and advertising that promotes consumer awareness on the younger generation has a clear universal significance. In 1945, it was not the war that ultimately was won for the United States, but the culture of consumption that we talked about in the last chapter in the youth magazine

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Seventeen. Through this culture and the flood of fashion products, including clothing, Coca-Cola, jeans, baseball, soda, ice cream, and crackers, it began to sweep through the vacuum of post-Nazi Europe (Savage, 2007: 445). Nearly half a century later, in the early 1990s, what really dispelled the excessive political resentment of the younger generation, and thus completely eased the intergenerational antagonism that had become increasingly tense because of the “June fourth political turmoil”, perhaps is not tighter ideological education, or even more open economic policies, but what Deborah Davis-Friedmann calls the “revolution” in Chinese consumption, especially among the younger generation, brought about by openness and economic development. Two examples can be used to discuss the case of China. Firstly, as mentioned above, the annual sales of the advertising industry in China has increased from 10 million CNY to 867.4 billion CNY over the past 40 years, with an average annual growth rate of 54.2%. This growth rate is much higher than the amazing GDP growth rate over the same period, and the average annual growth rate is as high as 78% in the three years (from 1991 to 1994) after Deng Xiaoping’s “southern tour speech” in 1992. Secondly, when talking about China’s consumer revolution, Davis observed that, starting in 1992, at least in Shanghai, children or teenagers as an independent consumer group were directly targeted by advertisers. As a result, “China’s headlong plunge into ‘market socialism’ immersed an entire generation of ‘singletons’ into an increasingly commodified environment deeply engaged with the products and advertising of global capitalism” (Davis, 2000: 54). And, interestingly, international foods such as pizza, donuts, bagels, and sushi, along with greater mobility and the spread of mobile phones, computers, and the Internet, which began in the 1990s, instead of bringing about ideological troubles, promoted the growth of a real national culture and the understanding of foreign cultures, which greatly strengthens people’s identification with the whole country (Vogel, 2012: 652). The younger generation’s preference for advertising is borne out by local research. A study of household consumption in urban China found that children are the least resistant members of the family to advertising. They use it more as a playmate in their daily lives. In particular, advertising provides them with cutting-edge fashion culture, the most fashionable public topics, so children are more likely to use advertising as information for entertainment, and are also more likely than their parents to believe in its truth. Their shopping desire is also more likely to be stimulated by advertising (Chen, 2005). Almost at the same time as this research, when we interviewed in Beijing in 2004, several middle school students in Beijing 31 Middle School talked about the influence of advertising, and they all said at the same time that there was an extremely popular post on the Internet: (On the first day, the principal caught the student climbing the wall.) Principal: Why don’t you go in and out of the gate? Student: Metersbonwe, no ordinary way. Principal: How did you get over such a high wall?

88 The media Student: (Points to his pants) Li Ning, anything is possible. Principal: How does it feel to climb over the wall? Student: (Points to his shoes) Xstep, an unusual feeling. (The next day, the student entered the school through the gate, and the principal saw him again.) Principal: Why not over the wall? Student: Anta, I choose, so I like it. (On the third day, the student was dressed like a social hoodlum.) Principal: Don’t you know there’s a school rule against wearing hoodlum clothes? Student: You are what you wear, Semir. (On the fourth day, students wore a vest to school.) Principal: You can’t wear a vest to school. Be civilized. Student: Man, just be simple, Edenbo. Principal: I’ll give you a major demerit recording. Student: Why? Principal: M-zone, I am the master of my site. As the title of this section suggests, modern advertising sells not just goods or services, but a whole way of life. Considering that at the time of reform and opening-up in 1978, in China, a country with a population of more than 1 billion, commercial advertising was basically zero, as mentioned above, so in a way, the 40-year history of China’s reform and opening-up is the rapid growth of modern advertising from nothing. Over the course of more than four decades, guided by advertisements, children chose transformers, Rubik’s cube, SuperBot, Poli seaweed, Bugles, and Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf; young people chose jeans, sneakers, lovers’ suits, beepers, hand-held computers, and iPhones or iPads; women chose fashion trends, gold and silver accessories, beauty products, spas, Louis Vuitton, or Prada handbags; men chose Shanshan suits, Goldlion ties, Lacoste jackets and Hermes belts, Porsche SUVs, Rolex or Vacheron watches; and the old people chose oral liquid, medicine, a pension mode, and a health care mode. As for choosing a color TV, refrigerator, recorder, video recorder, VCD or DVD, washing machine, air conditioner, home computer, and private car according to the advertisement, it is something that almost every family has experienced. In fact, in the consumption experience of Chinese, as Daniel Bell described Americans in the 1970s, “advertising begins to play a subtler role in changing habits than merely stimulating wants” (Bell, 1996: 69). In other words, while advertising becomes an incubator of our desires, it also becomes deeply embedded in our daily life and as a part of our lifestyle. And the younger generation’s natural affinity for advertising also often makes our way of life present a “bamboo” type renewal and replacement from the young age group to the old age group.

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The significance and function of advertising to the progress of human society need not be said, but people of insight often reveal the other side of advertising. As we have already pointed out in Chapter 1 when we talked about consumerism, because advertising, on the one hand, satisfies people’s needs, and on the other hand, as Galbraith said, “creates” people’s needs endlessly (Galbraith, 1958), modern advertising is essentially the twin brother of consumerism, which bears the responsibility for our society slipping into the mire of consumerism step by step. Thus, the historian Arnold Toynbee even asserted that the fate of Western civilization will depend on the outcome of our struggle against what Madison Avenue stands for (Zhou, 1994: 21). Compared with Toynbee, sociologists evaluate the negative meaning of advertisements in more detail. In The Lonely Crowd, which we quote over and over again, David Riesman explains vividly how modern businesses rely on psychologists, market surveyors, and statisticians for market analysis and consumer research, and on this basis “systematically” sell their products to consumers through the mass media, including advertising. In Riesman’s eyes, the terrible thing about advertising is not that it exaggerates the goods themselves, but that it has a great power to shape people’s lifestyles: Just as it is impossible to separate the messages of advertising in the media from the “messages” carried by the goods themselves, displayed in the stores, the streets, and the home. We still believe that the long-run impact of the media on the style of perception, the understanding (or, more often, the misunderstanding) of life, the sense of what it means to be an American boy or girl, man or woman, or old folk, is immense—more important than the often overestimated power of the media to push one marginally differentiated product or candidate over another. (Riesman et al., 2001: lxiv) Twenty-five years later, Daniel Bell further analyzed that the dependence of the modern market economy on advertising or the mass media, while emphasizing consumption and cultivating hedonism, also formed a fierce conflict with the old values of hard work, thrift, and moderation advocated by Protestants, and constituted an irreconcilable cultural contradiction of capitalism (Bell, 1996). So far, consumerism has shaken the use of goods and become an illusory symbol of their holders’ social class or so-called “status”. Due to the prevalence of consumerism, our age is the first age in which both food expenditure and “reputation” expenditure is called “consumption” and thus falls into the trap of goods and their apparent affluence (Baudrillard, 1998: 163, 165). Do not assume that criticism of advertising and consumerism is directed only at the Western hemisphere. In fact, because of its openness to the world and the globalization that comes with it, China has become a link, even the most important link, in the production and consumption chain of global capitalism.13 The culture of consumerism that began in the West has

90 The media flooded into this once impoverished country with Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Barbie dolls, French perfume, Italian fashion, Japanese electronics, and German cars. While changing the living standards of the people in this country, it also completely reconstructs the values and lifestyles of Chinese people, including consumption, through advertising. Almost overnight, the life idols of Chinese people changed from productive idols like Lei Feng, Wang Jinxi, Chen Yonggui, Chen Jingrun, and Lu Wenting to consumption idols composed of sports stars, performing stars, and entertainment stars (Tao, 2006). The extravagance and waste, fuelled by the unique “Chinese characteristic” of “consumption by public funds”, have eroded the foundation of this ancient civilization. In Chapter 1, when discussing globalization and the wave of consumerism, we have already shown from the perspective of generational differences that while the older generation is generally a stickler for traditional consumer ethics, and the younger generation are advocates and spokesmen for consumerism, China’s current so-called middle class, or “successful people”, aged 45 to 60, have generally gone from extreme scarcity to extreme abundance, so their consumption may be more conspicuous than that of the younger generation (Veblen, 1967: 75). It is based on distrust of this generation that I would prefer to believe that younger generations raised in real affluence are likely to take a hard look at the meaning of consumption. In other words, while affluence does not necessarily form a detached attitude towards material life, it is a necessary prerequisite for such a detached attitude. From the Russian Decembrists and their wives to the American hippies who led the “global rebellion” 150 years later, the reason why the two radically different groups of people are willing to give up their wealth, status, and fame is more or less related to the indifference they developed due to the wealthy life of their early years. In the interviews, we also repeatedly meet the “rich second generation” with ideals. They not only take the family business earned by their parents calmly, but also show disdain for their parents’ face-saving and vainglorious extravagant behavior. If the overall atmosphere of this country can develop in such a manner, our 42-year GDP growth or wealth accumulation may one day breed true “spiritual aristocrats”. In that sense, today the modern building of advertising which is tilted against human ideals by its aggressive promotion of consumerist values may possibly be righted in the hands of a younger generation. And the younger generation, who have grown up under the bombardment of advertising since childhood, may also become the first generation to truly understand the professional teachings of advertising master David Ogilvy.14

Digitized “natives” and “immigrants” Despite the complexity of our discussions, all of them have been guided by basic theoretical principles—“generation” is both a biological fact and a social

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fact, and it is always the great historical events that divide the two generations in the social sense. Now, when discussing the impact of different types of mass media on human groups, including different generations, such theories are somewhat challenged. The development of the mass media itself can also be an effective tool to divide different generations. Of course, if we regard the leapforward development of the media as a major historical event or even a historical period, we can easily turn such challenges into powerful theoretical assistance. In 2001, just as humanity was entering the new century, American author, educator, and game designer Mike Prensky proposed that, over the past 20 years, the rapid development of electronic media, especially the Internet, has divided two radically different generations: digital natives and digital immigrants. The former were born and grew up together with network technology over recent decades. They regard modern science and technology represented by the network as an inevitable part of their living environment. For them, using a computer or other electronic device is as natural as breathing air. Thus, you can call them the net generation or the digital generation, but the label Prensky finds most useful is the “digital natives”. Today, our students are native speakers of digital languages such as computers, video games, and the Internet. The latter, in terms of age alone, would be adults over 40 or 50. The new digital environment that emerged in the 1990s was like a new continent to them. Accordingly, “as Digital Immigrants learn—like all immigrants, some better than others—to adapt to their environment, they always retain, to some degree, their ‘accent’, that is, their foot in the past” (Prensky, 2001). In 2008, when Hu Yong, a budding communicator, read Mike Prensky’s short but surprisingly imaginative essay, obviously, while accepting the two wonderful concepts of digital natives and digital immigrants, he was also shocked by Prensky’s description of the young Americans or the so-called “digital natives”: Currently, before graduating from college, the average American teenagers spend nearly 10,000 hours playing video games, send and receive 200,000 emails and chat messages, spend 10,000 hours talking, playing games and downloading data on mobile phones, watch TV for more than 20,000 hours (fast-switching MTV is their favorite), view about half a million TV commercials—at the same time, they read only about 5,000 hours. (Hu, 2008: 367) As two living generations in today’s world, digital natives and digital immigrants are radically different not only in the way they receive information and the time they spend on it, but also in the way they operate. In his essay, Prensky enumerates the “accents” of the digital immigrants: They often print their mails out to read or save,15 while those who ask secretaries to do it for them are even more “provincial”; they also often pull people into their offices to look at an interesting website, rather than sending it out to others. By contrast, digital natives are accustomed to receiving information very quickly, preferring to

92 The media multitask, preferring diagrams over text, and preferring random access (as in hypertext). They are excited when they go online, like instant affirmation and frequent rewards, and prefer games to “serious” work (Prensky, 2001). Do not assume that the difference in electronics or digital usage between generations is only happening in Prensky’s world tech powerhouse, the United States, the phenomenon of giants and dwarfs in the electronic world that we described in Chapter 5 of the first volume of this book has become a global intergenerational landscape. This distinction between giant and midget has nothing to do with physical height, or even with spiritual nobility and inferiority; it is only related to age. Take what we call the digital generation here. Although China’s comments on the generation that grow up with globalization and the Internet after the 1990s vary, almost all pre-80s think that they are really not our species, and the main factor that causes this “new species” to appear is the emergence of the Internet and the information age that follows it in leaps and bounds. In this age, proficiency coexists with non-proficiency. They were born in the Internet age with a mouse in their mouth. The degree of their proficiency in computer control makes parents and other “newbies” unable to supervise, so “Green Dam” (an Internet filtering software) is indeed a helpless choice. Now an 11-year-old primary school student in Beijing has to do his homework in PPT format, while his father doesn’t even know what the PPT template is. (Xiao, 2010: 191) Also based on globalization, what happened in China, a big developing country, is just as common in other developing countries today. Sometimes, in the absence of strong state control, the picture of change created by the development of the Internet in the developing world is even more startling than in China: When Aung San Suu Kyi was first released, she took a knee-jerk step back from supporters holding up their cell phones to take pictures of her. She had never used a cell phone, and when she was asked to talk to her youngest son, Kim, in Bangkok, she wasn’t sure the gadget would actually connect people. She didn’t even know where to speak. The world had changed so much that while there was no Twitter or Facebook, and mobile phones were not popular enough, let alone developed into an omnipotent mobile terminal, when she was placed under house arrest for the third time in 2003, now, the Internet and its generation have changed the world, and perhaps Myanmar too. On many occasions, she said that one of the happiest things in this year was to see more young people participating in movements. (Yang, 2012) While China today does not have the same space as Myanmar to engage in radical social movements, the Internet is creating a space for younger generations that their parents never had. We found in the interview that many children, or

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the younger generation, not only learn information and things that their parents did not know through the Internet, but also form their unique hobbies and lifestyles through the Internet. During the interview in Nanjing, I met NNB who was 19 years old. The boy, who graduated from Nanjing Foreign Language School last year and enrolled in his freshman year at the University of Rochester, hoped to major in biomedical engineering, but his hobby was bodybuilding. NMB, one of NNB’s high school classmates, said that NNB used to be a good basketball player, especially a very good shot, but he was not as well-known for this as he was later for bodybuilding. After all, there are a lot of good basketball players in our school, but it was different when he became a bodybuilder. He was the undisputed “alpha male” of our grade. Now whenever students talk about NNB, they say, “Oh, that guy. He’s strong.” (NMB, 2013) NNB’s mother, who studied computer science and later worked in technical management, could not explain why her son was interested in bodybuilding. Actually, NNB’s first idea for bodybuilding probably came from his deskmate, whose love of physical fitness stimulated NNB to a certain extent by reading in front of him magazines like Health and Beauty and Bodybuilder. But his motivation for later bodybuilding came from the Internet, or the microblog of professional bodybuilders. NNB expanded his network by practicing fitness. Although he was young, he was often in contact with various members of society, far from his age. For example, in his first vacation after studying abroad, when he just came back from abroad for a few days, there were engineers and general managers who invited him to dinner now and then. I asked him why the general manager wanted to have dinner with him, and he replied he was a buddy he had met in the gym back home. But it’s probably the Internet that has helped him the most with his fitness. Through the Internet, he not only establishes regular contact with a large group of bodybuilding enthusiasts, and frequently exchanges experience and knowledge about bodybuilding with them, but also turns directly to professional athletes for advice. One day, when he was still in middle school, he said to me excitedly, “Mom, that man talked to me!” I said, “Who talked to you?” He replied, “Ronnie Coleman. Don’t you remember? The strongest man in the history of bodybuilding!” I took a closer look, and it was. NNB emailed Ronnie on his twitter address, and the African-American, who had been crowned “Mr. Olympia” for seven consecutive years, replied, giving him his home address. NNB would talk to Coleman about fitness and ask him about his physical or strength statistics, such as how thick the arms are, how many pounds to squat, and how many pounds to lift the legs. One time NNB asked Coleman in a skeptical tone, “They say you can lift 1080 pounds in

94 The media a squat. You might not be able to lift it, right?” As a result, Coleman gave an ambiguous answer, which I can’t remember was “should be” or “may be”, probably “should be”. You see how much help the Internet has given him. (NNM, 2013) NNB’s friendship with Ronnie Coleman reminds me of Negroponte’s friendship with another high school student, Michael Schrage, who also made personal connections with Internet gurus like Negroponte through the Internet. And as Schrage’s father said, he met all kinds of people online, and most surprising of all, “all sorts of people, Nobel Prize winners and senior executives, seemed to have time for Michael’s questions. The reason is that it is so easy to reply” (Negroponte, 1995: 202–203). But do not assume that the Internet is simply a way for young people to meet celebrities, get fit, or, more broadly, indulge a wide variety of personal interests. In fact, the Internet and the resulting digital way of life, as Negroponte said, make computing no longer just about computing, but something that determines our survival (Negroponte, 1995: 15). For example, the nature of the job market will change dramatically as we use fewer atoms and more bits; as businesses become more global and the Internet grows, there will be fully digital offices; the mass media will be redefined as a system for sending and receiving personal information and entertainment, and “as we interconnect ourselves, many of the values of a nation- state will give way to those of both larger and smaller electronic communities” (Negroponte, 1995: 7). In fact, like Prensky, Negroponte sees the biggest change in the online world as the “upending” of two generations. Convinced that each generation of humanity will be more digital than the last, the founder of the new media lab has no doubt that “the control bits of that digital future are more than ever before in the hands of the young” (Negroponte, 1995: 231). As a citation, Rainie Lee, in “Digital ‘natives’ invade the workplace”, brilliantly describes the gap between the two generations facing the digital world through a 22-year-old college student: “I’m the one living in the digital world. Playing with more equipment, for my father, is work, and for me, is life” (Lee, 2006). As a result, advocates of digital society, such as Negroponte and Prensky, naturally agree that human society is facing huge discontinuity as never before—a gap between generations. The brains and ways of thinking of the young or digital natives are very different from ours or those of the digital immigrants. The human dilemma is related to this: Our generation of digital immigrants who speak outdated languages are educating digital natives who have mastered new languages! Prensky came up with all sorts of ideas for how humans could get out of this dilemma. While these ideas may not actually solve the problem, at least two of Prensky’s assumptions are valuable. For one, we must acknowledge that the brains of the young and digital natives have changed, and that we do not know much about their new world, so we should humbly use their help to learn about and integrate into this new world. We must strive to learn to

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communicate with them in their language and manner, which means faster learning, less rigidity in behavior, more synchronic and parallel learning, and the ability to randomly shift to other events. What’s more, after this huge break, human learning has split in two: the traditional contents, including reading, writing, arithmetic, logical thinking, understanding of past works and thoughts; and future contents, which are mostly about digitization and technology, including software, hardware, robotics, nanotechnology, and genetics, as well as the new ethics, politics, sociology, and linguistics that come with them (Prensky, 2001). Obviously, if we want to continue to be educators, we need to find ways to use digital natives’ languages to teach these traditional and future contents. Like the title of Chapter 4, Volume 3 of Negroponte’s book, Digital Life, the best way to combine educational contents and methods in the Internet age, as Prensky suggests, is to “learn from games”. From MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte to online game designer Prensky, they have repeatedly argued that we can embed skill learning in games. Thus, just as Prensky believes that educational games are not whimsy, but reason rather than illusion (Prensky, 2001), Negroponte also believes that most adults fail to see how children learn with electronic games. The common assumption is that these mesmerizing toys turn kids into twitchy addicts and have even fewer redeeming features than the boob tube. But there is no question that many electronic games teach kids strategies and demand planning skills that they will use later in life. (Negroponte, 1995: 204) And, of course, if you think about it differently, not all things brought by the network society or information technology are beautiful things; there are also hidden dangers. Among them, the increasingly popular mass media and network information technology make it possible for the virtual environment to replace the natural environment of people, especially children, so that children may lose their innocence (Li, 2001). Children and teenagers spend a lot of time on TV, computers, or video games, as a result, their reading time is greatly reduced and their thinking becomes flat (Odland, 2004), and they gradually lose their interest in real social life to become “otaku” and even “otaku babies”. Because human interactions are increasingly conducted through virtual worlds or cyberspace, this leads to “people being online all the time. In the cyberspace, spreading new technologies can bring tens of thousands of friends or fans, but human beings are lonelier than ever” (Cao & Zhuang, 2013). Further, because of the advance of Internet technology, young children rush into the virtual world or cyberspace in advance. Intelligent electronic devices such as iPads or iPhones have aroused great interest among children, and technological alienation transforms the young population of the global village into the “play labor” of the online society— people who play games on the Internet. They provide a kind of free labor for information manufacturers like Apple or Microsoft, and become an

96 The media indispensable link in the global expansion chain of capitalism in the information age (Kucklich, 2005; Qiu, 2009). In recent years, more and more Chinese scholars pay attention to the hidden dangers brought by the network society or information technology. In 2012, Cao Jin, a communications scientist, studied nearly 100 middle-class families in Yangpu district, where Fudan University is located, and found that developing countries like China are vulnerable to technology myths, making it easier for middle-class parents to consider computer skills as an important aspect of their children’s abilities. Thus, with the popularization of multimedia terminals represented by tablet computers and smart phones in Chinese society, children’s leisure time is increasingly occupied by various new media devices. However, when training information skills, improving media literacy, and assisting children in learning become the most common reasons for children to be exposed to a large number of new media, they will not just get entertainment and computer skills, but also become “qualified” consumers and young “play labors” in the information society, and they have used their supposedly colorful childhood to provide multinationals with the most tamed and fun-loving market available (Cao & Zhuang, 2013).

Information is power As I write this subheading, I naturally think of a quote from science historian Michael Saylor about the information revolution. In his recent book The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything, the CEO of MicroStrategy, a company with a dual interest in human history and information technology, wrote: The Agricultural Revolution took thousands of years to transform vast tracts of land, populated by nomads, into cities, towns and villages around the world. The Industrial Revolution imposed its massive socio-economic changes over a period of a few hundred years. By simple extrapolation, we might expect that the Information Revolution will require tens of years to achieve pervasive changes in our lives and businesses. (Saylor, 2013: 229) Saylor’s confidence in the information revolution came from his insight into human history and the nature of information itself. In terms of human history, the information revolution can be regarded as a significant historical progress of human society comparable with the agricultural revolution and industrial revolution. The information revolution can be traced back to the appearance of cuneiform script in 4,000 BC, but its large-scale impact on human society begins with the invention of Gutenberg printing in the 15th century, which was inspired by the Chinese movable type printing. The advent of the telegraph and telephone in the 19th century extended the coverage and immediacy of the information revolution, and the emergence and popularization of mass media

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such as radio and television from 1920 to 1950 further enhanced the coverage and immediacy of information. In terms of information itself, it is its particularity that gives the information revolution unprecedented power. Saylor realizes that first, although information is the “core energy” of the revolution, it is not the same as physical energy sources like fuel or electricity; in fact, all human actions create new information, so it is constantly increasing. Second, unlike oil or electricity, every drop of information has a different energy value. For example, “The house is on fire” has much more energy than “The temperature is 68 degrees Fahrenheit”. Furthermore, for different consumers of information, even the same “drop” of information can produce completely different energy values. The dollar’s exchange rate against the euro, for example, has a completely different energy value for currency traders and taxi drivers. Third, the energy sources of oil or electricity are a superposition, with ten drops of oil or ten kilowatt-hours of electricity containing ten times as much energy as a drop of oil or a kilowatt-hour of electricity, but the information energy content is exponentially distributed. In other words, a collection of information droplets may contain much more energy than the sum of the individual droplets. For example, the total production of wheat in a given year is valuable information, and information on the total yield of wheat over ten years, plus the rainfall data and fertilization conditions during the same period, makes 30 times the amount of information, but it may contain 100 times the information energy. Obviously, the trend and related effects it presents will lead to more decisions (Saylor, 2013: 255). It is because information is so powerful, and there is so much information in modern society,16 that faced with an information explosion, almost all theorists will emphasize the technical capabilities related to information acquisition. Manuel Castells, for one, believes that the information technology revolution induced the emergence of informationalism, as the material foundation of a new society. Under informationalism, the generation of wealth, the exercise of power, and the creation of cultural codes came to depend on the technological capacity of societies and individuals, with information technology as the core of this capacity. (Castells, 2010b: 372) In today’s information society, almost all service industries, especially those high-end services where technology is king, are, after all, professions dealing with information. Aviation scheduling, for example, uses flight, airport, and weather data to determine aircraft movements and landings; investment bankers make decisions on corporate financing, mergers and acquisitions, sales and trading of financial products such as stocks and bonds, as well as asset management and venture capital business based on trading information in the financial markets; insurance companies use risk information to evaluate policies; doctors use

98 The media physical information (e.g., electrocardiograms, imaging data, blood biochemical indicators) to develop treatment plans; teachers choose the appropriate content from the vast amount of relevant information to instruct students of different ages; even supermarket clerks deal with customers’ transaction information every day; and bus drivers have to use traffic information to choose a smooth route. Thanks to the development of computers, the Internet, and all kinds of software, we are now able to gather information at a speed we have never seen before. For developed countries with high computer penetration rates, as mentioned above, collecting information and processing data through electronic computers is of great convenience. In developing countries including China, mobile phones, which are increasingly developed to personal handheld computers and mobile terminals through 3G or 4G technology, provide ordinary white-collar workers and even grassroots people with convenient access to daily information. For example, the use of mobile phones enables: Tanzanian fishermen to easily collect weather information, enhance cooperation in fishing, deal with emergencies, and negotiate prices for seafood (Myhr & Nordstrom, 2006); migrant workers in India, Mozambique, and Tanzania to respond to emergencies, maintain family relationships, and save on living expenses (Souter et al., 2005); small businessmen in Rwanda to better broaden their business vision, adjust their working place and procedures (Donner, 2005: 39); and migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta in China to obtain employment information sent by friends, former workers, and employers, thus improving their employability (Ngan & Ma, 2008). The mobile phone survey we mentioned in Chapter 5 of the first volume of this book also found that for low and middle income groups, mobile phones are not communication tools in the general sense, but more of a means of livelihood. For example, even those “bangbangs” who live at the bottom of society in Chongqing and work as porters for others are also now using mobile phones for business. For a bangbang without a mobile phone, he can only rely on another bangbang who does have a mobile phone to get daily job opportunities (Zhu, 2011). While everyone, from airline dispatchers and venture capital managers to Tanzanian fishermen and Chongqing bangbangs, has benefited from the information revolution, the undisputed reality is that the millions of people caught up in the maelstrom of the information revolution differ greatly in how they get information and the quantity and quality of that information. If we call this huge difference in access to information the “digital divide”, we can find that in the popularization process of almost all information communication technology (ICTs), there is an insurmountable divide between different users in various fields such as mobile phones, computers, and the Internet and broadband. Some people think that this difference can be regarded as the technology divide, which is caused by the technical differences between developed countries and developing countries, and between the middle class and grassroots people in developing countries in the application of ICTs (The Economist, 2005). Some other people think that this difference is an economic divide, that is to say, the

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digital divide essentially reflects the imbalance of economic development. The International Telecommunication Report, for one, confirms that there is an association between the level of development of ICTs and income, and that this is becoming more and more apparent over time (ITU, 2009: 271). We admit that the technology divide, the economic divide, and even the social divide caused by the stratification of the information society (Xue & Liu, 2010) reveal the profound significance of the digital divide regarding different aspects, but the problem is that none of the existing concepts can explain why there is a stark digital divide in countries and regions with the same economic and social development conditions, or in social groups at the same level of education, occupation, class, and income, or between parents and children, and between the older generation and the younger generation, within the same family. Although some, such as the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), recognize that demographic characteristics, including age, sex, race, income, and urban and rural area, are all linked to the digital divide (ITU, 2009: 45), no one refers to the digital divide just as an “intergenerational divide” as we do (Zhou, 2011a). When we say that the digital divide is an intergenerational divide, we do not mean something that is merely subjective imagination. According to the statistical report on the development of the Internet in China, by the end of June 2019, 65.1% of China’s 854 million Internet users were under the age of 40, while the number of Internet users over 40 was declining rapidly. The 20–29 age group was 24.6%, 40–49 age group was 17.3%, the over-50 age group was 13.6% (CNNIC, 2019), so it is true that the number of ICT users is declining with age. In the last ten years, the elder’s disadvantage in the use of electronic computers has become increasingly obvious with the popularization of computer networks, as well as the structural complexity of computer hardware and the functional complexity of software. Home computers are far faster than they used to be in terms of information processing speed and hard disk capacity, especially with all kinds of operating and editing software. You can use a computer to process words, translate between languages, edit and typeset, make graphics and tables, process digital or quantitative or even qualitative data, and make PowerPoint documents; you can also use it to download text or photos, make photo folders, watch movies and TV, find maps or weather forecasts; you can even use it to send emails, participate in discussions on bulletin boards (BBS) and Forum, write blogs or microblogs, and share your radio or TV programs by sending audio or video files. Clearly, the more computer and network technologies are developed, the more disadvantaged parents become. Just operating the computer and surfing the Internet is not easy for many less-educated parents, because it requires operational ability, professional knowledge, and even a good foundation of English (although there are more and more Chinese materials on the Internet, many materials and information on the Internet are still in English), which makes most parents feel powerless. Therefore, it is indisputable that since children have the advantages of computer operation and language use, combined with their great energy and wide range of interests, they basically monopolize

100 The media the “discourse power” of the Internet and its information. It is further conceivable that this intergenerational divide in information access cannot but have an immeasurable impact on the values, attitudes, perspectives, participation abilities, and even survival opportunities of the two generations. In fact, the differences between parents and children are not only reflected in the skills of information acquisition, but also in the content of information acquisition. Although in theory parents can also watch TV, listen to the radio, or surf the Internet and tweet, in real life, they tend to be distracted by work and family affairs, have a single interest, and have a poor ability to obtain information, so the amount and quality of knowledge and information they obtain from television, the Internet, or other mass media are not as good as those of their children. In our interviews, many parents said that after a hard day at work and housework, they would naturally choose something relaxing to watch: football games (father), romantic dramas or soap operas (mother), but for their curious children, the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the US–Iraq war, the feminist movement, the Indonesian riots, green food, Microsoft technology, viral mutations, the NBA, and the financial crisis all arouse their keen interest. If young children, as Guo Yuhua’s research shows, often only get knowledge about food and toys from TV (Guo, 1998), the teens and twenties we are studying are learning much more from television, newspapers, and other media. But this is only the first step, and the content that children get on the Internet is incredibly rich. For trendy parents, the main way to get online is through socalled “portals” like Sohu, Sina, and Netease, where they learn the simple information technology of browsing the news, and the information they get is mostly the news on the home page of these websites. However, for children, they can get almost any information they want through the Internet. They can use the Internet to find MTV clips of singers they are interested in, search or download movies of videos, search for homework materials, and solicit votes for Yao Ming to enter the NBA all-star game, which is often not accessible to their parents. In this way, children become very comfortable with the vast amount of information on the Internet. Like the Tanzanian fisherman or the Chongqing bangbang, SCB from Shanghai is also a beneficiary of the spread of information technology, but the young “rich second generation” uses information far more technologically than the average migrant worker. SCB got average grades in middle school, and the Shanghai Petrochemical Junior College he later attended was far from a prestigious university, but his major—computing—satisfied him. After graduation, it was difficult to find a job, so SCF, who was engaged in a sales agency of the wine industry, asked his son to assist him in the company. At the beginning, SCB had no interest in “selling wine”, but had to do it because of his father’s urging. Just at this time, online shopping began to catch on in China. Led by a number of shopping websites, such as Taobao, Tmall, Dangdang, JD, and Suning, online sales had surged. For example, in 2014, the annual sales of Taobao alone reached 1.8 trillion CNY, and the one-day sales of singles’ day (November 11) exceeded 60 billion CNY. So SCB, with his quick mind and

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professional skills, quickly proposed to his father SCF to act as the agent of Zhejiang “Tower” yellow wine and set up a flagship store on yhd.com to sell it. SCF accepted his son’s advice and left him in charge. After just over a year, the yellow rice wine sold by SCF and SCB on yhd.com, known as the “online supermarket”, entered the top three online sellers and increased the overall sales volume of SCF’s Tianyuan Wine Industry by 40%. Now SCB was considering setting up a Tianyuan flagship store on Yes My Wine, China’s largest B2C Wine sales platform, to help his father expand his online reach beyond yellow wine into other wine. Further, the impact of computer and Internet technology on our lives, and especially on intergenerational relationships, has been fueled in the last decade by what Saylor calls the “tipping point” of the information revolution—mobile technology—fueled by the proliferation of mobile phones and iPads. As we all know, in the process of the information revolution, the emergence of business computer information processing technology in the 1960s is a key step. If the use of the steam engine contributed to the emergence of the Industrial Revolution, then computer information processing technology is the “steam engine” of the information revolution. But just as the discovery of electricity was the tipping point of the Industrial Revolution, the next step, the advent of mobile computing, is more important. It is mobility that makes all previous applications more valuable because it has the following advantages: eternity (24 hours, 7 days a week), instant access (wireless network), convenience (various applications), and accessibility (lower cost) (Saylor, 2013: 254). If the media and information revolution driven by Internet technology brings about a revolution in the content and way of information acquisition, then by combining with mobile computing technology, the information revolution truly brings about an all-round change in the way of human life. Communication master McLuhan once said that any new media is an evolutionary process, because it opens the door to new areas of perception and activity. The medium is not only information, but also all human cultures (McLuhan, 1994: 422). In this sense, the media and information revolution we are talking about is not only the product of social change, but also social change itself. Accordingly, the differences between parents and children in the content, ability, and way of obtaining information are in fact part of the transformation of human life style. Thirty years ago, or even twenty years ago, parents who controlled the use of home phones by their teenage children (it was almost a routine sight of urban Chinese families three decades ago that parents sat by the telephone in the living room after dinner to control their children’s so-called “bad interactions”) were almost the only “social presence” or partner these only children had outside school. But after 2000, the spread of the Internet, especially mobile web technologies like the iPhone or iPad, allowed children to break out of their parents’ control, Through QQ, Renren, blog, and especially WeChat, which developed rapidly, they were able to keep close communication with their partners from the moment they step into their house until they go to bed. This time– space extension of peer group communication not only replaces the traditional

102 The media top-down communication between parents and children, but also forms a new communication and lifestyle for children. As a matter of fact, with the development of mass media, computers, and the Internet, children are not only likely to be separated from their parents, but also from their teachers, classrooms, and textbooks, and gain knowledge and information often unheard of by parents, teachers, and other adults. This has become the most important way for them to acquire the “feedback” ability or “discourse power” in their interaction with parents, teachers, and even the whole adult world. In this book, we have presented a multi-dimensional picture of how children or younger generations gain discourse power through their excellent ability to acquire information in their interactions with parents or older generations. Further, if with the future development of mobile computing technology, actions like reading the morning paper, queuing to conduct banking business, checking in and out at the hotel, shopping in the mall, learning in the library, using the copier in the office, and waiting for others to clean up the paper copier all become what Saylor calls “old habits” that would be eliminated by automation, then the younger generation, who have a natural affinity for mobile software operating on mobile technology, may form a more distinct life guidance or “action hegemony” in the face of the older generation struggling in the mobile world. In this sense, in the future of mobile technology, younger generations will write more detailed historical footnotes to the belief that “information is power”.

Notes 1 In the world of communication, an example of the power of radio is President Roosevelt’s “fireside talk” during World War II. At that time, more than half of the 100 million Americans heard “fireside talk” on the radio, and he received an average of 4,000 letters from listeners every day (Zhan & Yang, 1991: 171–174). Hitler’s path to power in Germany also benefited from total control of broadcasting, and simplification and repetition were the secret to the “success” of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. But it is cable broadcasting, as we have already discussed for China under Mao Zedong, that most controls ordinary people. Clearly, cable radio controls not only the audience’s choice of media content, but also the freedom to listen and not listen. 2 There are two examples of the argument that television promotes rationality. For one, McLuhan said that if television had existed before Hitler, there would have been no such figure (McLuhan, 1994: 368). For another, in the 1960 U.S. presidential election, the debate between Kennedy and Nixon was televised live, and Kennedy won. Kennedy’s victory was a bit lucky because most radio listeners thought Nixon would win and a few television viewers thought Kennedy would win. In that debate, more people watched TV than listened to the radio, so Kennedy won not only because he spoke beautiful words, but because he looked beautiful (Levinson, 2001: 99, 98). 3 Of course, I’ve always believed that every extension is an overuse of a sensory organ that eventually becomes a detriment to that organ. For example, the use of radios, tape recorders, and especially earphones causes damage to the ears, and the use of television, especially computers, causes damage to the eyes (I have also suffered from dry eye syndrome as a result of 20 years of writing on a computer). The

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most comprehensive statement, therefore, should be that every medium is an extension of, and a detriment to, some sense organ. In 1967, Milgram found through experiments that the average person can make contact with anyone they don’t know through an average of less than six people, which is called “Six degrees of separation”. Anthropologist Robin Dunbar suggested that the stable social network defined by human intelligence was 148 people, rounded to 150, and is known as the “Rule of 150” or “Dunbar’s number”. If these two laws are true, the number of people theoretically accessible through a network of six people is 150 to the sixth power, or 11,396,250 million. That’s more than all the people in human history put together. Thus, network theorists assert that it is theoretically possible to connect with anyone in the world through six people. After 1949, the political environment did not allow Yan Yangchu to continue to promote the rural construction movement anymore. After he was forced to leave, he expanded the original slogan of the Chinese People’s Education Promotion Association from “eliminating illiteracy and be new citizens” at the beginning of its establishment to “eliminating worldwide illiteracy and be new citizens of the world”. From the 1950s to the 1980s, civilian education organizations were set up in Thailand, the Philippines, India, Ghana, Colombia, Guatemala, Cuba, and other countries to continue to carry out the theory and experience summarized in the “Ding county experiment”. In 1967, the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction (IIRR) was established in the Philippines. In 1943, Yan Yangchu, along with Einstein and Dewey, won the honor of “Ten Great Men with the Most Revolutionary Contributions in the Modern World” issued by the Copernicus Quadricentennial National Committee. He was honored as the “father of the world’s civilian education” (Song, 2003: 3). Most of the main characters in the 11 issues of male photos are related to the AntiJapanese War after 1937, including Chiang Kaishek, Feng Yuxiang, Zhang Fakui, Bai Chongxi, Li Zongren, Zhu De, and “the new soldiers of China”. For example, the cover of the 69th issue was an image of a young and fit woman holding a tennis racket and wearing sportswear; the 77th issue showed the swimmer Yang Xiuqiong, who was called “mermaid” at that time, wearing simple and lightweight sportswear and full of strength and beauty; the cover of the 86th issue was Ms. Hu Die who was trying out riding a horse on the outskirts in spring; on the cover of issue 118 was a picture of a bodybuilding lady; the cover of issue 139, the “new era Chinese women” issue, was a picture of a woman in military uniform, holding a steel gun, and being gentle and containing masculinity; and the cover of the 148th issue was a picture of a new woman bending a bow and shooting arrows. The exact words of the “two whatevers” are “Whatever decisions Chairman Mao makes, we firmly support them; whatever instructions Chairman Mao gives, we resolutely carry them out.” The “two whatevers” was first proposed by Hua Guofeng and proposed by the editorial of “two newspapers and one magazine”— the People’s Daily, the People’s Liberation Army Daily, and the Red Flag magazine—on February 7, 1977. On the contrary, it has been noted that a moderate amount of jealousy can often promote social competition and progress. For example, the anthropologist Homer Garner Barnett has long observed through his study of primitive peoples that the envious man is often deprived of resources and therefore has much less to lose in any new attempt, which often makes him an adventurer in social life or an agent of innovation (Barnett, 1953: 401–406). The spring of 1979 was the first spring after China’s social reform and opening-up. On January 25 of this year, Shanghai TV set up the advertising business section, and on January 28, the first commercial advertisement in the history of Chinese TV was born: the one-and-a-half-minute “Ginseng Tonic Wine” advertisement (Huang & Chen, 2006). Then, on March 9, a live international women’s basketball match on Shanghai TV was interrupted by a TV advertisement for “happy coke”. This ordinary

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advertisement caught people in Shanghai, who had always thought they were wellinformed, by surprise. It caused Shanghai viewers, who had gathered to watch because of the low TV penetration rate, to exclaim “Wrong broadcast! Wrong!”, so much so that the next day the Shanghai newspaper had to print a message explaining that what was broadcast during the match was not a live broadcast of the match, but one of the first TV advertisements just shot by Shanghai TV. Then, on March 15, CCTV also broadcast the first foreign commercial advertisement—that of Citizen Watch in Japan, which was “famous all over the world” (Zhou, 1994: 2). In 2011, CCTV’s annual advertising revenue had reached 22.8 billion RMB, followed by Shanghai Oriental TV (7 billion RMB), Hunan TV (6 billion RMB), and Jiangsu TV (4.3 billion RMB) (The Member Department of China Advertising Association, 2012). In terms of individual columns, the top three programs in 2012 were CCTV’s “News Broadcast” (4 billion RMB in advertising revenue), CCTV’s “Focus Interviews” (3 billion RMB in advertising revenue), and “If You Are the One” (2 billion RMB in advertising revenue). In the 1980s, in a developed society like the United States, the average person spent 20,000 hours watching TV from birth to the end of high school, but they accumulated no more than 14,000 hours of formal education in the classroom (Cutlip & Center, 1988: 351). Considering that the average viewing time over 18 years was 20,000 hours, and that the average daily viewing time was only three hours, it can be speculated that the average Chinese today watches as much TV as Americans did in the 1980s. If you consider that China, a country with the second largest GDP in the world and the 87th largest per capita GDP in the world, ranked first in luxury consumption in 2012, you get an idea of the extent to which people, especially the affluent, worship “consumption” in China. A country that barely had enough to eat four decades ago has become a country where a materialist or consumerist ideology prevails. In 1962, while David Ogilvy was making a name for himself as an international advertising scientist, his sister, Lady Hendy, advised him that advertising should be scrapped. Ogilvy calmly and presciently told his sister that advertising should not be abolished, but it must be reformed (Ogilvy, 1991: 149). So far, though advertising is getting better at technology, the transformation of its sense of social responsibility gets further and further away. It’s the same with me. Although I have been writing on a computer for more than 20 years, I always print out a page after finishing it. Over the years, I have also asked students to finish their assignments, print them out, put the text in my college mailbox, and repeat over and over again: “I do not accept electronic assignments.” In 2011, Walmart alone handled more than a million customer transactions an hour. Large companies like eBay, Bank of America, and Dell each manage a huge amount of data in petabytes (1,000 terabytes, or 10 raised to the power 15), while the global data volume has reached the level of zettabytes (10 trillion gigabytes, or 10 raised to the power 21). In fact, social networks have contributed a lot to the growth of data volume. In 2011, Facebook hosted more than 50 billion photos, equivalent to seven photos per person worldwide, and people shared 30 billion pieces of content every month. In 2006, Twitter appeared in the United States, and only six years later, it grew to 155 million tweets a day (Saylor, 2013: 256). On August 28, 2009, Sina microblog was launched in China. In July of the following year, the total number of microblogs generated by Sina alone exceeded 90 million, which means the average number of microblogs generated every day was more than 3 million, and the average number generated every second was nearly 40 (Sina.com, 2010). The number of users of WeChat created in October 2010 had reached 1.1 billion by June 2019, and the number of WeChat messages generated every day was countless.

4

What has been ushered in by cultural reverse?

Instead of rebelling directly against parental authority in favor of a contrary ethic, the modernizing Chinese sought to establish warmer and more sympathetic relationships with their parents. The ethic they championed was so innocent that, if understood by their parents, it could only make the latter proud. The significance of this pattern of revolt is that Chinese youth generally have steadfastly denied, under great provocation, any hostile feelings toward their parents in spite. Their need to speak of the goodness of parents has been an almost absolute imperative, which in turn reflects the intensity and completeness with which they have learned to repress their emotions of hostility and aggression. Lucian Pye 1992

The modern dilemma concerning filial duty Our fast-changing times, with their rapid economic development, changing social structures, increasing access to information, and the growing power of peer groups, have turned traditional intergenerational relationships on their head from 1978 to 2020. When the phenomenon of cultural reverse discussed in this book becomes a common way to reconstruct the intergenerational relations of Chinese society, it will also have an unprecedented impact on the long tradition and changing reality of this ancient nation. The first to suffer from this turbulent tide of history is the concept of filial piety, which we discussed in detail in Chapter 2 of the first volume of this book, and the tradition of filial piety developed on this basis—because it is the concept of filial piety centered on “obedience” and “no violation” that lays down the most basic code of conduct for the traditional parent–child relationship in China (Zhou, 2008a). As we have explained, this code of conduct gives rural Chinese parents the right to educate their children, and further forms the basis of their daily authority, by forcing the younger generation to gradually accept it in daily life through the indoctrination of etiquette and custom, and then to become a part of traditional Chinese culture. Although “filial piety” is broad in content, its basic meaning is nothing more than “serving parents”, “respecting parents”, and “obeying parents”; in short, children must “try their best to obey and meet their parents’ requirements and wishes” (Yang, 2008). DOI: 10.4324/9781003024309-4

106 What has been ushered in? Children’s filial duty is based on two motives. One is reward. Parents have worked so hard to raise their children, and have suffered so much for this, that the latter have to reward the former beyond adulthood. The other motive is justification. Children are filial to their parents, not only because they are loved by them, but also because they are “parents” and we are “children”, which is what people call “justification”. We do what corresponds to “justification”. Xu Fuguan calls filial piety based on the above two motives “filial piety out of love” and “filial piety out of respect” (Xu, 1975), which are two different levels of filial piety. The former is based on emotional factors, which involve the mutual affection between parents and children, while the latter is based on rational factors, which involve the rational obedience of children to parents due to their different roles. As the core of Confucian morality and Chinese tradition, filial piety has suffered from the tide of changes of modern times. It has experienced three major impacts in the past hundred years. The first onslaught began after 1840 and peaked around the May Fourth Movement of 1919. At this time, all sectors of society, led by the intelligentsia, began to challenge the rationality of filial piety, in addition a variety of “non-filial” trends of thought prevailed in the world. The reason why the filial piety advocated in China for thousands of years began to encounter a crisis and fall into its modern predicament is not only because people at that time “felt deeply the irrationality of filial piety from the perspective of children” because of the changes of the times (Ni, 2004), but also because Western influence was gradually spreading into China. The result of the Opium Wars allowed the Western colonists to drive straight into China with their powerful ships and cannons. In a series of humiliating treaties, the Chinese civilization, which had endured for thousands of years, was severely challenged, and the cultural superiority of its subjects was completely lost. Failure and humiliation began to cause people to question the national tradition and culture, including filial piety, and then to voice it negatively. What can be understood is that the result of the Opium Wars first made the Chinese realize that what was backward with their civilization was the science and technology on which the strong ships and cannons were built. Therefore, Wei Yuan, who advocated “adopting the skills of the western countries to control them”, clearly defined the strength of the West in terms of warships, firearms, and military training (Wei Yuan, 1998: 26). In 1861, Feng Guifen, who was the first to clearly express the idea of “Chinese knowledge as fundamental, and western knowledge as application”, proposed a way to save the nation from its crisis by “taking Chinese traditional ethics as the basics, supplemented by the art of prosperity of various countries” (Feng, 1994: 84). Under the guidance of this thought, the Westernization school, which tried to “strengthen the nation” and “seek wealth” in the face of national crisis and collapse, naturally believed that “China’s civil and military systems are far more advanced than those of the west, except for firearms” (Wen et al., 2002: 398). Thus, in almost the whole of the 19th century, even when the crisis came, the mainstream of Chinese thought was to stick to tradition. While introducing Western

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knowledge, the school advocating “Chinese knowledge as fundamental, and western knowledge as application” always kept it within a range acceptable to Chinese society, so as to maintain the ethics behind the system. At that time, “all those who talk about current affairs and teach western knowledge accept or agree with this proposition, and even the early reformists are the majority of those who advocate it” (Chen, 1982), so that for the time “the whole country has taken it for granted” (Liang, 1998: 97). As we have already mentioned in Chapter 2 of the first volume of this book, the Westernization movement soon after, especially the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, declared the end of “Chinese knowledge as fundamental, and western knowledge as application”, and prompted the reformers represented by Kang Youwei to advocate the fundamental reform of China’s system. However, the moral code and its core filial piety, based on Confucianism, were finally pushed to the forefront of the tide of reform. For example, by attacking the “three cardinal guides”, Tan Sitong attacked the key point of traditional filial piety and advocated the equality between father and son. As the saying goes, “The son is the son of heaven, and the father is also the son of heaven. The status of the father is not earned by himself, but derived from generations. Therefore, father and son should be equal by nature” (Tan, 1981: 348). Although the reform that lasted from the Reform Movement of 1898 to the May Fourth New Culture Movement was often accompanied by the trend of restoration, it is just this “failure of the new, and restoration of the old” (Chen, 1959) that finally led to the emotional radicalization of the elites of the new culture movement. Therefore, Chen Duxiu advocated that “if we are determined to reform, everything should adopt the new methods of the western countries, and there is no need to make trouble with the myths about the essence of Chinese culture and national conditions” (Chen, 1984: 270). Qian Xuantong also believed that “in order to keep China alive and make the Chinese nation a civilized nation in the 20th century, the fundamental solution must be to abolish Confucianism and Taoism, especially the traditional Chinese language that records Confucian doctrine and Taoist demonology” (Qian, 1918). In such a radical atmosphere, Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Hu Shi, Qian Xuantong, Lu Xun, and Zhou Zuoren, the giants of the new cultural movement, criticized the traditional concept of filial piety under the banner of “down with Confucius”. Even Mao Zedong, who had read the New Youth and worshipped Chen Duxiu, did not hesitate to regard traditional Chinese thought and morality as “hypocrisy”, and believed that only with “magnanimous people” could the reform be carried out fundamentally. In the eyes of the rebellious young Mao Zedong, Confucius was a symbol of the great power of the ideological circle, so that “there are many reasons for our opposition to Confucius, and we cannot help but oppose it simply because it monopolized China, prevented our intellectual circle from being free, and made us slaves to idols for two thousand years in repression” (Mao, 1995: 368). But within a decade, the first shock of traditional filial piety began to wear off. Not only did the conservative Beiyang government advocate “respecting

108 What has been ushered in? Confucius and restoring ancient ways”, but even the revolutionary Sun Yatsen advocated “taking democracy from Europe and America as an example, while still integrating the old culture from thousands of years ago” (Sun, 1981: 560). In 1928, the national government of Nanjing decided to offer Confucius a sacrificial ceremony, requiring that “the day of Confucius’ birth should be set as a national memorial day, and the words and deeds of Confucius should be narrated to show admiration” (The Ministry of the Interior, 1928). At the same time, in the name of Sun Yat-sen and the Three People’s Principles, the national government elevated “carrying forward the inherent virtues of the Chinese nation” to “the highest guiding principle of the revolution”, and “made loyalty, filial piety, benevolence, faith, righteousness and peace the guiding principles of the people”, which should be “popularized” for all people to “follow proper customs” through such forms as “incorporating them into primary and middle school textbooks”, “engraving them on steles”, “hanging them on plaques”, and “publicity speeches delivered anytime and anywhere” (The Ministry of Administration, 1994). In 1934, Chiang Kai-shek launched the New Life Movement with “the core of restoring traditional Chinese morality and advocating ethics, righteousness, integrity and shame”. Although the aim of the movement was to “achieve the modernization of the Chinese people” (Chiang, 1946: 99), its foundation was still the traditional national morality. Chiang Kai-shek not only made “filial piety and observance of marital fidelity” the essence of the New Life Movement, but also regarded “filial piety for parents, respect for the elders, love for the country and defense of the nation” as an important content of school education and the basic requirements of life (He Riqu, 2013: 207). Three years later, because of the outbreak of the war of resistance against Japanese aggression, nationalist sentiments were running high, and the national government even tried to use traditional culture to unite the people. “Loyalty and filial piety” was regarded as “the foundation of the Republic of China” in the “Program for the founding of the People’s Republic of China” adopted in 1938, which called upon “all the compatriots to show their utmost loyalty and filial piety to the state and the nation at this time of national crisis” (Supreme Council for National Defense, 1939), thus once again extending the object of filial piety to the country and nation. If in the field of political life, the rulers, under internal and external pressures, had repeatedly invoked the traditional culture with loyalty and filial piety at its core as a means of rallying the people and inspiring the nation, in the realm of everyday life, although at this time, under the influence of the new ideological trend spread by the May Fourth Movement, the public, especially the urban youth, had shown a distinct modern tendency regarding the aspects of values as described in Chapter 2 of the first volume of this book, most people did not completely abandon the traditional concept of filial piety—they usually did not have a real conflict with their parents. When in conflict with their elders, the younger generation largely adopted the peaceful style of Lucian Pye, the American Sinologist whom we quoted at the outset. Further, as Pye

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continued to analyze in his book The Spirit of Chinese Politics, if generational conflicts were unavoidable: Another way in which the youth could make an oblique attack on parental authority was by following quite consciously a strategy of compliance while at the same time finding new areas for the expression of personality development beyond parental control. Parental authority could be accepted fully so long as this meant little more than adherence to the rituals of deference within the home. Outside of the household the young Chinese felt free to seek a new world, and in doing so he told his parent little about what he discovered. This did not always entail a sharp conflict, for the individual could feel that he was complying with his old master even as he accepted new taskmasters. The young might turn to Western knowledge, something about which his father knew little, and believe, and make his father believe, that by becoming a dedicated physicist or modern scientist he was in fact bringing greater glory and honor to his family. By moving into a world completely removed the individual was able to escape from the tensions of parental control while claiming to be still respectful of traditional authority. (Pye, 1992: 113–114) The second onslaught on China’s traditional filial piety came after the victory of the Chinese revolution in 1949 and culminated in Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in 1966. The earth-shaking changes in Chinese society after 1949 and the establishment of a highly integrated social system made it possible to fully express the long-standing rebellious spirit of Mao Zedong as discussed in Chapter 2 of the first volume of this book. Traditional culture, including ancestor worship and filial piety, once again bore the brunt of relentless criticism. In 1950, the Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China, the first law of the new China, emphasized the “freedom of marriage between men and women” and negated the “order of parents” by law. In 1956, Mao Zedong took the lead in criticizing traditional grand funerals and long bereavement, advocating cremation and the reform of funeral rites and customs (Mao, 1992).1 At the same time, since the beginning of land reform and collectivization, ancestral halls, temples, genealogies, and public lands related to the traditional clan succession culture were confiscated or destroyed. Peasants who were mobilized smashed temples (Zhou, 1998a: 161), abolished genealogies of families and clans (He Riqu, 2013: 214–215), and destroyed and abandoned a large number of ancestral halls (Zhu & Chen, 2009). The impact of this devastating revolution on filial piety was, of course, far more dramatic than the comments of John King Fairbank and Edwin Reischauer, not just because of ideological radicalism, but because the sweeping social changes that took place after 1949 also hindered strict enforcement of the filial tradition in general. Anyone familiar with Chinese tradition knows that while filial piety is a virtue involving parent–child relationships, it is maintained partly on the condition that children inherit their parents’ jobs or property—

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children’s filial piety to their parents can be the criterion for parents allocating to them their inheritance. This also shows that the intergenerational relationship in China is a reciprocal exchange relationship. As a result, older parents effectively control their adult children’s filial piety and other behaviors until they die. However, after the revolution in 1949, the situation changed a lot, and the urban and rural elderly began to face different circumstances. First the countryside. After the cooperation in 1953 and the people’s commune in 1958, the collectivization movement that swept through rural China made land, livestock, and tools to be owned collectively by people’s communes, which led to the middle-aged generation in rural areas basically losing their absolute power to restrict their children. This change accelerated the disintegration or collapse of traditional filial piety. American sociologist Deborah DavisFriedmann noticed when she studied the intergenerational relationship of Chinese society that, before 1949, the sons of poor farm laborers, who had little family property, basically took over the decision-making power in family affairs when they reached their prime, but in the average family, because parents had property, they still had control over their adult children. However, collectivization eliminated the resources held by the parents before liberation, and by the end of the 1970s, this model, previously popular in the families of ordinary farm laborers and poor peasants, had become the mainstream model in the families of all economic classes in the countryside (Davis-Friedmann, 1991: 81). Similarly, Guo Yuhua’s field studies in rural Hebei province also found that decades of revolution had led to a decline in the status of the elderly. Specifically, they have no assets, no property, no honor to pass on to the next generation, or that they have nothing to give in exchange for something in return, which means a change in the economic basis of the pay-reward intergenerational ethical relationship. It further led to the crisis of filial piety in rural areas and even the difficulty of supporting the elderly (Guo, 2001). Compared with the rural elderly, the urban elderly fared better. A 1994 study in Baoding, Hebei province, by Martin Whyte, an American sociologist, found that “most older urban Chinese are very satisfied with their lives and their relationships with their children”. In answering the question of why filial piety had retained more power in modern cities than in more traditional rural areas, Whyte found that the survival of filial piety in urban China was linked to parents’ higher economic and social status. It is precisely because the urban elderly enjoy higher pensions, more spacious housing, and medical treatment that today a considerable proportion of them can live apart from their adult children, and they can also be financially independent. At the same time, when they need support, support can come from both sons and married daughters (Whyte, 2003: 303–304). In fact, as we mentioned in Chapter 2, not only did the elderly no longer have to rely on the young, but they could even help the younger generation in terms of housing, living

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expenses, and career access. This unique mode of pay–reward alleviated the impact of radical ideological revolution on filial piety in this period to some extent. Except for the radical parent–child conflicts that occurred during the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the concept of filial piety among ordinary urban residents is still largely preserved by the children’s material dependence on their parents. But outside the family, generational tensions and conflicts have never been higher. Because of the devastating “great rebellion” of the younger generation and the crazy trampling on the “dignity of teachers”, the older generation has become more disappointed and vigilant towards the latter; the younger generation, abandoned by the “revolution” or “rebellion”, and facing various obstacles in real society, also become more suspicious and resentful of the former than ever before. The third shock to China’s traditional filial piety began in 1978 with the reform and opening-up, and which peaked in the post-1992 market wave. To be frank, the reform and opening-up, to a certain extent, made up for the multiple fissures, including intergenerational conflicts, in Chinese society caused by the Cultural Revolution. The reopening of universities and the return of “old cadres”, and the various changes that had taken place during this period, offered the best opportunity in life for both the young and the old. At this time, with the abandonment of the radical revolution, the country “revived the great Chinese civilization” and advocated “critically inheriting all the fine moral traditions in human history” (CPC Central Committee, 1986). As an echo, the academic circle also began to reiterate that filial piety is a “traditional virtue with Chinese characteristics”, which “should not only be discussed, but also be discussed enthusiastically” (Yan, 1983). In this context, the metaphor of filial piety begins to imply hard work, responsibility, and selflessness. There is no inevitable conflict between being a filial son and a good communist (Davis-Friedmann, 1991: 69). However, the rapid social changes triggered by the reform and opening-up does not provide a realistic basis for the revival of filial piety. On the contrary, more and more rapid social changes shake the realistic foundations of Chinese tradition in different aspects. For example, in terms of political concepts, while promoting the progress of Chinese society, changes also excessively raise the expectations of Chinese people, especially the younger generation, regarding the progress of their own country. In the first ten years, the rapid economic growth and inflation brought by price reform increased the dissatisfaction and anxiety of ordinary people while providing them with a better life. The opening of the market and the dual-track system of price made the first batch of “tide riders” of the market economy and the children of cadres engaged in “official corruption” to “get rich first” (Zhou, 2010), which increased the “sense of relative deprivation” of the public and even general cadres. Finally, due to the openness and the relatively free contact with Western society and Western ideological trends, the difference of views between the veteran cadres who fought for the revolution and the students who were accustomed to a comfortable life was further widened (Vogel, 2012: 566). First in late 1986, then in May–June 1989, the

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anxieties and grievances of the younger generation about a society that was already changing rapidly poured out violently through mass street rallies. In fact, differences in political views are not the main reason for the intergenerational conflict and the decline of filial piety in Chinese society. Soon, as we have already seen in Chapter 3 of the first volume of this book, the gap between the younger generation and their not conservative elders was completely closed by Deng Xiaoping’s policy of further reform and opening-up. However, as the political passion faded, the social transformation triggered by the transition from planned economy to market economy posed new challenges to traditional intergenerational relations. After 1992, with more and more young people going into business or going out to work, with the frequent “de-regionalization” of the population in urban and rural society, and with the promotion of the one-child policy and the change of family size and form, the traditional family structure and the foundation of intergenerational relationship in Chinese society were changed. This change finally eliminated the status and power of the older generation in the family, and traditional filial piety received a fatal blow. With the causes of the eventual breakdown of traditional filial piety carefully sorted out, we may mention some of these factors. First, because young people are more attuned to the market, which in turn pays according to the market price of one’s human capital or contribution to distributable outcomes. In both urban and rural areas of China after 1992, the income of young people began to exceed that of their parents, who generally had no economic accumulation during the Mao Zedong era. This made the domination or control of the older generation over the younger generation lose its economic or practical basis. For example, Yan Yunxiang’s field research in Xiakuan village in Heilongjiang province found that villagers’ “family property was mainly gathered during the reform period. During this period, the younger generation has proved that it is more adaptable to the market economy than the older generation” (Yan, 2006: 207), so most of the latter could but accept the fact that their children were in charge. They also gradually became resigned to their children’s “disobedience”. Second, social changes have brought about frequent population movements. The Sixth National Census conducted in 2010 confirmed that the floating population in Chinese society had reached 260 million, and the number of people who had mobile experience—including those previously from rural or inland areas who had settled down in cities or coastal areas—was even higher. We have argued that the greatest erosion of intergenerational relationships by de-regionalization flows in both geographical boundaries and old relationships is that they weaken parental control over offspring. Take the famous Zhejiang village in Beijing in the 1990s. Tens of thousands of young farmers from Yueqing Hongqiao, Wenzhou gathered in the Dahongmen area of Beijing. They made their own way by engaging in the production and trading of clothing, shoes, and hats, not only taking root in Beijing, but also breaking away from the traditional restrictions of Wenzhou rural communities, including elders’ rights (Zhou, 1998a). Third, if market factors lead to the decline of the status of the elderly and mobility factors make young people “out of reach” for the elderly, then the one-child policy

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has led to changes in the family structure in China, and children have become more important than ever. After 1980, due to the promotion of the one-child policy and the change of Chinese people’s parenting concepts, there are fewer and fewer traditional large-sized stem families or joint families and a large number of miniaturized nuclear families (the average population of Chinese families is only 3.1 people, according to the Sixth National Census), which changes the relative importance of parents and children in family life. Since most families have only one child, the “4–2–1” family structure tilts the focus of the family. This, as we have argued extensively in this book, has turned the lives of not only parents but also grandparents around their children. The needs of the child become the needs of the adult, the desires of the child become the desires of the adult, and the child becomes the ultimate master of a family’s choices and decisions. The reason I call the changes in Chinese society in the last 30 years or so the “real fatal blow” to the millennia-old tradition of filial piety is that the first two strikes were, in the strict sense, nothing more than a revolution in ideas or a subversion of ideas. They simply declared the irrationality of traditional filial piety in different ways. However, both the May Fourth Movement and the Cultural Revolution failed to overturn the social and economic basis on which the traditional intergenerational relationship and the tradition of filial piety were formed in terms of family structure and lifestyle, except for the appeal of ideas. In fact, as long as the Chinese live together, as long as the young are dependent on their elders, and as long as the elders have the economic or social power to hold the young in check, complaints, dissatisfaction, and even resistance are ultimately unable to change the subordinate status of the young; and even the abandoned filial piety will eventually return to life as the basic rules of intergenerational relations. We have seen that in the pre-1949 and post-1949 periods, once the younger generation that first revolted against the irrationality of adult society becomes the dominant one, they still unconsciously inherit the traditional intergenerational relationship principle that they had abandoned earlier, when they maintained or carried forward the original scorned filial piety in different ways. This is also the fundamental reason for the rise and fall of the revolutions around intergenerational relations and filial piety.

The technique of balance: giving directions without undermining parental authority Although we have repeatedly stated that “obedience” and “no violation” are not only the core of the concept of filial piety, but also the most basic code of conduct to deal with the parent–child relationship in traditional China for thousands of years, we have also repeatedly stated that the content of “filial piety” is very broad, and it almost involves every aspect of the parent–child relationship and even the intergenerational relationship, including at least three aspects: serving parents, respecting parents, and obeying parents. In recent years, by analyzing the contents of 3,760 journal articles concerning “filial piety” from 1869 to

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2009, He Riqu has operationalized the connotation of filial piety by dividing it into seven aspects: support, care-taking, respect, humble advice, love, consolation, and funeral sacrifice (He Riqu, 2013: 261). If carefully analyzed, it can be found that, although each of these seven aspects has its own independent meaning, support and care-taking basically belong to serving parents; respect, funeral sacrifice, love, and consolation belong to respecting parents; and humble advice belongs to obeying parents. More radically, so-called filial piety, according to Chinese folk belief, indicates that obedience is its core, or at least that it mainly includes the material “support” of parents and spiritual “obedience” to them. If material support is the reward for our parents’ upbringing, and spiritual obedience is our nominal recognition of the father–son relationship, this division is then basically consistent with the views of Xu Fuguan and Yang Zhongfang cited at the beginning. Here again, it is not pointless to discuss the meaning of filial piety. In Chapter 2 of the first volume of this book and the first section of this chapter, although we repeatedly use the concept of Taiwanese scholar Ye Guanghui, affirming that traditional filial piety has encountered a “modern dilemma” (Ye, 1995), and that it is declining in general, it should also be noted that, because of the broad nature of filial piety, its different connotations are not entirely uniform in their degree of challenge or decline. Whether it is studies in Taiwan, Hong Kong, or mainland China, scholars have found that modern Chinese people still have a higher acceptance level of “serving parents”, followed by “respecting parents”, while “obeying parents” is challenged the most (Ho, 1996; He et al., 2007: 27–28; Deng & Feng, 2003); in other words, in terms of the inheritance of the tradition of filial piety, people generally begin to feel that “service” is easy and “obedience” is difficult.2 In 2009, He Riqu conducted a questionnaire survey of 1,200 urban and rural residents in Qingdao, and found that there were significant differences in the recognition of the seven connotations of traditional filial piety among Qingdao citizens. In the five-point questionnaire survey, people’s identification degrees are successively as follows: respect (mean 4.62), comfort (mean 4.61), love (4.59), support (mean 4.51), care (mean 4.45), funeral sacrifice (mean 3.78), and finally humble advice (mean 3.07). In response to the multiple choice question, “What do you think should be done to honor parents in the first place?”, 72.1% of respondents select “respecting parents”, followed by “taking care of parents in life” (65.4%), “caring for parents” (49.8%), “materially supporting parents” (41.7%), and “comforting parents” (39.8%), whereas only 14.9% select “obeying parents” and 0.5% select “holding a grand funeral for parents after their death”. Obviously, this study also confirms that while “serving parents” and “respecting parents” are retained to a large extent, “obeying parents” is confronted with severe challenges. If He’s study accurately reveals the reality of China’s intergenerational relationship (our theme), the emergence of the phenomenon of cultural reverse and the continuous expansion of related fields also change China’s traditional parent–child interaction mode, making “respect” and “disobedience” start to become a basic intergenerational “balance skill”.

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When discussing the social impact or consequences of the phenomenon of cultural reverse, we have pointed out that the “reverse” of the offspring to the parents usually does not affect the affection between the parents and the children, but it does change the original parent–child relationship mode, especially improves the status of the offspring in the family and their right to speak in family affairs. (Zhou, 2000a) This statement actually includes two questions. For one, does the “reverse” of the offspring to the parents affect the relationship between parents and children? For another, does the “reverse” of the offspring change the status between parents and children? On the first question concerning whether cultural reverse affects the relationship between parents and children, our interviews focused on whether parents are able to calmly accept their children’s reverse and how their children behave when giving advice to their parents. Generally speaking, today’s parents are more or less aware that their children are different from what they were like in their own childhood or youth due to the acceleration of social changes. In fact, it is a sign of social progress that the children or the younger generation are smarter or better-informed than themselves, so there is nothing to be ashamed of in accepting their reverse. For example, BNM, the woman we mentioned in Chapter 4 of the first volume of this book, who became the Party Branch Secretary of the brigade at the age of 22 in the Mao Zedong era, said with deep feeling: I did listen to my parents when I was young. I did whatever they asked me to do, and there was never any negotiation. Although I later became the Party Secretary of the brigade, to be honest, it was nothing but a king of children. I could be cocky on the outside, but not at home. Because my father was working away in the railroad army, everything in the family was decided by my mother. It’s a completely different relationship than I have with my daughter now. Although the child is not the “decision maker” at home, I do put her in my heart and want to talk to her about everything. I think my daughter is very independent, so no matter what happens, after I discuss it with her father, I will discuss it with her again when she comes back, so that I can feel secure and decide what to do. For example, there is going to be a professional title examination for accountants in Beijing in May next year, and I hesitate whether I should take it as I have already obtained the accounting license. When I talked to my husband, he did not encourage me, insisting that an accounting license was enough for a person on the verge of retirement like me. However, when I talked to my daughter that evening, she was very supportive. She said maybe what I learned was not useful for my work, but it would be useful for the enrichment of my life, and I might be in need of it for

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Although in our interviews, most of the older generation said that they were able to accept the reverse from the younger generation, this “modesty” or “openness” is not without conditions. First of all, the children’s attitude must be good; otherwise, even if what the children say is right, the parents, especially those who have a certain social status or social prestige, will find it difficult to accept their words emotionally, feeling that their own “face” is at stake. In 1998, among the seven families I interviewed in Nanjing, NBF was the political commissar of the aviation force stationed in the outskirts of Nanjing, and her daughter NBG was a third-year junior high school student. Having been in the army for years, NBF did not know as much about the new things in society and trendy things like computers and mobile phones as his shrewd-brained daughter, so it was a normal phenomenon that NBF received reverse from NBG in weekend family interactions. To this, NBF’s feelings were mixed: My daughter has really helped me a lot. I don’t think this phenomenon is unreasonable, but it is difficult to accept it emotionally. In the army, the subordinates must obey their superiors, but when back at home, sometimes I have to listen to my daughter and follow her orders, so it is really hard for me. Of course, if NBG’s attitude is good, things will be made much easier. (NBF, 1998) Second, as NDM, who works in a long-distance bus station, said, “It is much more pleasant to accept ‘advice’ from one’s own children than from other younger people” (NDM, 1998). This difference in the acceptance of reverse from younger generations can be explained by two possibilities. Personally, it is nothing shameful or embarrassing to accept that your children are better than you—you can even boast as to how great your children are,3 but it is more or less humiliating to be dwarfed by other young people. Practically, if your children are better than you, maybe you will lose your face, but you will not suffer any real loss. However, if other young people, especially those who are more or less competitive with you in the workplace, are better than you, it can lead to real consequences, such as loss of position or interests. One of the interviewees in Beijing, BMF, a 47-year-old bank manager, had typical ideas: I have no trouble communicating with my daughter, willing and relaxed to learn new things from her, and quick to forget those occasional unpleasant

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moments. After all, our child is part of us, an extension of us, so it’s nothing bad for my child to be better than me; actually, we often expect him or her to be even better. But we don’t think this way at work. When we have to learn new things with young people in the same position, we have no other choice but to surpass them; otherwise, we’ll be replaced by them. This kind of competition is somewhat ruthless. Of course, if we can realize that it is a trend and a common phenomenon for young people to excel the old, we’ll learn to relieve our own psychological pressure. (BMF, 2005) When parents or the older generation have some reservations about cultural reverse, children or the younger generation have a more positive view. Most of them not only affirm that cultural reverse has a positive impact on intergenerational communication and mutual understanding, but also realize that the ways and manners of giving advice to their parents are of critical importance. They should learn to find a balance between respecting their parents and advising them. In other words, non-compliance with parents’ opinions should not affect their emotional or attitudinal respect or honoring of their parents. Take the NGF family we mentioned in Chapter 3 of the first volume of this book. NGF was a former air force pilot and later transferred to the bank as the chairman of the labor union. His son, NGB, who was a sophomore at the time, affirmed in our interview that cultural reverse would improve the relationship between parents and children. For example, I think both my father’s temper and professional ability are much better than when he was just transferred to a local job. He is no longer so commanding as he used to be, but speaks in a consultative way. In fact, instead of damaging his image, this change makes us more aware of how he feels when we talk to each other, and enables him to get along well with his young colleagues in the unit. Now, all the young people in his unit say that he is a competent union president. (NGB, 1998) There is a very simple reason why children, or the younger generation, learn to strike a balance between giving advice and retaining affection; after all, they are dealing with their parents or elders, who have made great efforts toward their growth, so no matter whether they can repay them or not, they should at least give them due respect, even if they don’t know anything or their views are completely wrong. In our interviews with dozens of families, most of the children said that they told their parents what they did not know “to make progress with them” (NCG, 1998) rather than to disdain them. One girl even made the thought-provoking remark: “I don’t think our respect and love for our parents is based on them knowing everything” (NDG, 1998).4 In addition, the experience of interacting with parents makes children realize that whether or not their parents accept their advice often has nothing to do with “what you say”, but a lot

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to do with “how you say it”. Most of today’s parents are able to be tolerant and receptive to children, especially their own, because they want to cultivate their children’s ability of independent thinking through encouraging them to “challenge authorities” and to seize the opportunity to know more about current society so as to keep pace with social development. Of course, all this happens with the premise that children or the younger generation do not fundamentally challenge their elders’ status and dignity. At this point, we have come to the second question concerning whether the “back-feeding” of children to parents will change the status between them. It must be admitted that, while parents insist that accepting advice from their children does not jeopardize their status and dignity, results of our interviews reveal that cultural reverse quietly changes to a great extent the relative position between parents and children. That is, cultural reverse inevitably raises the voice and decision-making power of minor children in family life. Many families now not only consult with their children when making decisions about daily purchases or collective actions, but often leave it entirely up to them. Parents now let their children make decisions ranging from what kind of drinks, foods, and clothes to buy, where to travel, what kind of transportation to take, and the specific transportation route, to the brand, size, model of TV, computer or car to buy, the style of house decoration and even the children’s own major and profession. Even BNM is not alone in talking to children about how to make her career more fulfilling. Of course, we find that the improvement of the status of children was the most prominent in the BV and BW families in the Zhejiang village we discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 of the first volume of this book. Doing business in a new place made the parents of these two families face both language difficulties and the lack of social contacts, so they, both in their 40s, decided to hand the financial control of the family to their young children, with them playing second fiddle to their children. In such immigrant families, younger children learn from older children who get ahead, and then pass on knowledge or experience to elderly parents who stay at home. They make their own decisions, do their own things, deal with the outside world on their own, and their position in the family is often unmatched by that of urban children who do not have actual family financial or decision-making power. NGG, who was studying for a master’s degree in foreign literature at a university, was sensitive to this change in parentage and status within the family. She said, Of course it affects our positions in the family. For example, my brother and I are now having more say on major family decisions, the most obvious sign of which is that parents are giving fewer direct orders and more room for negotiation. (NGG, 1998) Of course, it should be admitted that the rise of children or juniors in the parent– child relationship is not only due to their ability to back-feed their parents in all

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aspects of social life, but also to the changes in family structure caused by the onechild policy since the 1980s, which we have repeatedly discussed in this book. The popularity of the one-child family in China, especially in cities, not only makes the parent–child relationship significant in terms of the intergenerational tilt or the descending of the family orthocenter as mentioned in Chapter 1 of this book, but also increases the importance of the younger generation in this relationship. Moreover, the change of family structure increases the opportunities for parent–child interaction and shapes the mode of democratic participation and decision-making between parents and children (Lin, 2009: 2, 77). This mode of interaction improves the ability and insight of the offspring, and as we will soon see, also increases the likelihood that the parents will adapt to society.

Standing on the immature shoulders of the younger generation If the phenomenon of cultural reverse merely increases children’s status and voice in the family, then it is somewhat unfair to parents who are struggling to raise their children. In other words, if cultural reverse is merely an intergenerational subversive movement, which means the loss of the voice of parents or the older generation, then it is only a one-dimensional revolution: While children or younger generations have unprecedented opportunities to give directions, traditional educators, that is parents or the older generation, have apparently seen their status plummet. However, our interviews and research suggest that is not the case. This new mode of cultural inheritance not only endows children with confidence, knowledge, and power, but also broadens parents’ horizons and improves their ability to cope with the increasingly unfamiliar world. In this sense, cultural reverse is ultimately conducive to the common growth of the two generations. We interviewed dozens of families in five major cities—Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Guangzhou, and Chongqing—over the course of a decade and generally confirmed that the cultural reverse from the children not only makes the parents understand a lot of unfamiliar knowledge and change their perspective, but also improves their social adaptability. Take BBB’s family as an example. Although this is a family of intellectual parents—the father, BBF, a senior engineer, was one of the first 1977-grade undergraduates admitted to Tsinghua Chemical Engineering Department after the Cultural Revolution, and the mother BBM majored in English in university and then was engaged in management work in China Artists Association—they also benefit from the reverse from their son, BBB. Because BBB majored in automation in Tsinghua University, he naturally taught himself how to use computers and all kinds of electrical products. Whenever BBF and BBM argued over the use of a computer, BBM, who had previously trusted her husband’s engineering background, said, “Come on, let’s wait until BBB comes back. Or why don’t we call BBB?” (BBM, 2005). BBF added, “That means I’m out” (BBF, 2005). If you think that the advice from BBB is simply a way for parents to learn to use a computer or mobile phone, or just to learn how to use MP3 or Norton anti-virus software, then your view is too limited. In fact, the cultural reverse

120 What has been ushered in? from BBB even reconstructs the knowledge structure of her parents, especially BBM, making her handier in her post than ever before: I was transferred to the membership department of our association before I retired. When I got there, I was stunned. The records of the association’s tens of thousands of members over 50 years, from 1949 to 2000, were recorded on written cards—which, in other words, were a jumble of papers of varying sizes. Because members had to pay their dues every year and the association had to recruit new members, this pile of paper was very inconvenient to read. Managers before me simply avoided the problem because they either lacked the technical means or the knowledge and ability to amend it. But when I took over, it was different. Because I had more or less learned some computer knowledge from my son at home, I thought I could do it. What’s more, I had BBB behind me as a technical backup who knew everything. I gathered my colleagues from the members’ department, and at first no one was willing to do it. They all said they didn’t know how. It didn’t matter. For the problems they had, I would go home and ask BBB first, and then told my colleagues what to do at work. In this way, with the help of BBB, our association realized the computer management of member data for the first time, and our generation also caught up with the last bus to complete our historical duties. (BBM, 2005) From the results of interviews with various families, it can be seen that the knowledge and information parents get from their children’s guidance is indeed extensive and comprehensive. If there are no children, many parents say, they may neither have tried KFC and McDonald’s, or know such catchwords as “new money”, “fifty cent party”, or “cyber manhunt”, or stay up all night watching the World Cup or If You Are the One, or talk about stocks, play bowling, or wear jeans, or know of Pierre Cardin, Alain Delon, or Do Min Joon, or have any knowledge about the cloned sheep “Dolly”, the Qinshan Nuclear Power Station, or the “Long March-2” carrier rocket, or care about the Gini coefficient, soil erosion, ecological balance, or PM2.5, or review Chinese history or poems that they failed to learn well in high school, or use Windows XP, the Internet, or WeChat, or understand the market economy, business regulations, or “generalized monetary quantity”, or go shopping on Tmall or Dangdang. Indeed, today’s parents learn not only from their children about new ways or habits of consumption, but also about the courage, knowledge, and ability it takes to live and take it easy in a rapidly changing society. We can really say that without children, the window of the new China and the new world would not be so open today to the eyes of parents. As typical cases, many families we interviewed provide ample evidence for our point of view here. In the NG family we keep referring to, NGF, the former air force veteran who was widely regarded as “rigid”, said that even the knowledge of leisure and entertainment he got from his children helped him in his

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work. For example, his children watched DVDs and knew which movies had artistic taste or were impressive, so he was inspired to raise funds in the company’s union to set up a “DVD exchange center”, and asked children to help recommend DVDs. It turned out to be well received by the staff. Also, after playing bowling with the children, the union organized a bowling competition for the staff, enriching their lives. So NGF admitted that it was the cultural reverse from NGG and NGB that made him a “competent union President” in the eyes of young people. GGF, a senior engineer with management responsibilities in Guangzhou Iron and Steel Group, graduated from Wuhan University of Science and Technology and was only about 40 years old when we conducted the interview, but he also lamented that he had failed to catch up with the development of the times and often needed his 15-year-old daughter GGG to give him some cultural reverse. For example, when preparing for the annual work report, GGF thought that GGG could use PowerPoint and asked her to help. As a result, the PowerPoint produced was not only illustrated, but also included good animation, showing GGF’s management practice and work performance in this year at a glance. Therefore, the report satisfied the leaders and convinced the workers, and GGF naturally won the “excellent” assessment of that year (GGF, 2003). Like NGG, NGB, and GGG, SHG, a Shanghai girl majoring in psychology and mathematics in UCLA, was not only a good girl for her mother, but also a crutch for her grandmothers. Her paternal grandma lived in Shanghai, and her maternal grandma lived in Wuhan; one was a middle school teacher and the other a doctor before retirement, and both were nearly 80 years old then. Before going abroad, SHG went to Wuhan for vacations and taught her maternal grandma how to surf the Internet, send WeChat messages, chat with QQ, and play PC games. When she returned to Shanghai, she taught her paternal grandmother the same things, not only making it possible for the two families, which used to contact each other only a little, now to be connected by networks, as well as enriching their retirement lives. Whenever they had any problems with the Internet, they still sent WeChat or QQ massages to SHG across the Pacific Ocean for help. “The other day when I went to visit my mother-in-law,” said SHM, SHG’s mother, I found her busy working in front of her computer. When she saw me, she said to me immediately, “Come on! Here is your mom.” I was curious, “How can my mom by here? Where is she?” As I approached her desk, I realized what was happening. They were playing the game “Open a restaurant” on the Internet, with my mother-in-law as the manager and my mom as the waitress. With the network technology taught by SHG, their lives are indeed more lively. In contrast, my father-in-law doesn’t fit in well after he retires. He can do nothing but drink tea, read the newspaper and take a walk, so he seems quite lonely. (SHM, 2014)

122 What has been ushered in? NFF, a professor of sociology whom we mentioned earlier, felt a certain amount of anxiety from his “dependence” on his son, an anxiety that runs counter to the conventional wisdom in society. NFF believed that what we had to worry about was not the independence of children—many people are like the “Nine-jin old lady” in Lu Xun’s literary work and worry that our children are “not as good as” ourselves—but the decline in parents’ ability to live by relying on their children. NFF’s analysis of various social problems often had unique perspectives and sharp views, and his views on current intergenerational relations were equally refreshing: Just think, if someday our children have to leave us for work, for business, or for a foreign country, we may not know how to listen to the stereo, how to choose a TV program, how to open a microwave oven, how to use the timing device of air conditioning, how to handle life insurance, and even how to see a doctor, not to mention sending and receiving E-mails, surfing the Internet, and driving to visit old friends. (NFF, 1998) Although as far as he himself is concerned, NFF’s anxiety may never come true—they have altogether three children (which is quite unusual for Chinese couples their age), among whom they rely most on NFB, who has grown from a junior student in 1998, the year of our interview, into a postdoctoral at Brown University in America and now a teacher in the Chemistry Department of Nanjing University. This ensures that NFF and his wife have somebody to rely on not only in family life, but also in the spiritual world. But for many other parents, the issues raised by NFF is indeed the Achilles heel of most Chinese families entering old age. In fact, the only solution to NFF’s anxiety is timely and thorough cultural reverse. This means that parents should update their knowledge, change their way of looking at the world, develop behavior patterns in conformity with modern society—in a word, enhance their ability at social adaptation and avoid becoming an “outman”5 in this age of globalization and networking—with the help of their children before they leave home. We used to talk about standing on the shoulders of giants, but for almost all parents or the older generation today, the real secure and realistic choice is probably standing on the shoulders of their children or the younger generation. For all parents who can see their weaknesses or deficiencies, and are willing to set foot on their children’s young shoulders, they will not only broaden their vision and see enough of the scenery, but more importantly, they do not have to worry about “losing their footing”—their children will guarantee their parents’ safety by looking over them with all their strength and loyalty. For all children, to carry their parents on their shoulders takes not only the courage not to be afraid of being “trampled” on or “thumped” by their parents and elders, but also a strong mind—a weak mind, after all, cannot bear their parents’ increasingly heavy old concepts. It is in this sense that we have always thought that

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cultural reverse not only brings different spiritual wealth to the children and parents, two relatively independent generations, but also promotes the common growth of the two generations, bringing an unparalleled opportunity to facilitate good intergenerational communication and thereby reshape intergenerational relations in the Internet age. The primary reason why cultural reverse can promote the common growth of two generations lies in the new two-way information communication mode, which bridges the gradual distance between generations created by rapid social changes, and thus facilitates the mutual understanding between two or several generations that are increasingly unfamiliar. In the opening chapters of the first volume of this book, we repeatedly stated that the “generation”, or “generation gap”, which is the biological basis of cultural reverse, is a product of industrial society or modernity. It is the rapid change from traditional society to modern society that leads to the discontinuity between generations, which makes the contradiction and conflict between generations arise as an emergent social reality. Therefore, “generation gap” refers to the social phenomenon of difference, estrangement and conflict between different generations in terms of social ownership and choice of values and behavioral orientation due to the rapid changes of times and environmental conditions, the interruption of basic socialization processes or the transformation of patterns. (Zhou, 1994) For the three generations living today, the first generation, from the post-1910s to the post-1930s, grew up with one political movement after another, the short supply of a planned economy, and a uniform life symbolized by the “blue uniform”.6 They have suffered from brutal politics, material deprivation, and a monotonous life, but they cannot imagine any possible alternative to such a life—they are comforted by today’s abundance, and discomforted by its haste. The second generation, from the post-1940s to the post-1960s, who are now considered the backbone of society, have more critical consciousness than their parents and have a global perspective due to the reform and opening-up over the years, but they cannot shake off the traces of the old times, especially when they are in a hurry. Although the third generation, from the post-1970s to the post-1990s, that has just grown up now has the most global consciousness and knows all kinds of new devices in the Internet age, including computers, they are not only confused and complicated in regard to values, but also display bold and unusual behavior patterns and are heartless in daily life, which makes the previous two generations look at them with unrestrained contempt. Thankfully, cultural reverse promotes the mutual understanding between two or even three generations in an unprecedented reverse way that can also be regarded as the experience of modernity in addition to the traditional socialization path of father–son and son–grandson. If you are not paranoid, consider the “lethal”

124 What has been ushered in? argument of NAF, the professor of aesthetics we mentioned in Chapter 1 of the first volume of this book—“My son says . . .”, and consider Fan Jingyi, the old newspaper reporter mentioned in Chapter 1, who confesses to “go home and ask my grandson” whenever there is a problem. You must admit that this is a successful “counter-attack” of modernity in contemporary China! The second reason why cultural reverse can promote the common growth of the two generations is the mutual understanding between them achieved through two-way information communication, so that the two or more generations living at the same time can truly realize the relativity of their own culture and the rationality of other cultures. The recognition of cultural diversity, including values, life attitudes, and behavior patterns, can promote the mutual tolerance between two or several generations that were originally contradictory or opposite. If the rapid social changes in modern times lead to the generation break or generation gap, then one of the most important results may be that the intergenerational contradiction has become the most important form of conflict in human society, which is only inferior to the class contradiction. In modern China, the long-lasting traditional family culture ravages individuals to a suffocating extent. Once the growth of modernity (including modern democratic political thought, the school and factory system, the birth of freedom of the press and love) awakens the rebellion of the younger generation, the intensity of intergenerational conflicts is naturally unparalleled. For the older generation, the collapse of the old etiquette and system is for them like the death of their parents, so it is inevitable that some people will die for the sake of martyrdom. As for the younger generation, once they wake up, they will feel like Lu Xun: When I open up the history, I find that there was no date in it. On every page, the words “benevolence, justice and morality” are written askew. I can’t sleep at all. I read it through the middle of the night, and there are two words written all over it: “eat people!” (Lu, 2005: 447, 455) Therefore, for Lu Xun, the theme of social revolution was “save the children!” Furthermore, since the younger generation realizes that behind the suppression of their parents and families, there stands the feudal ethics and social system that has not collapsed for thousands of years, they must face a choice: they either return to the family to be filial, or become a fighter and declare war on society. Because of this, as Chen Yingfang said, the May Fourth generation developing “from resisting the family to reforming the society” is actually a continuous succession. This radicalism later even formed the social basis for the Communist Revolution to happen in full swing in China (Chen Yingfang, 2007: 83–157).7 Still, thanks to cultural reverse, we are living in a time of rapid change when two or more living generations are no longer competing or fighting

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with each other as their predecessors did. In other words, the emergence of a new way of intergenerational communication, cultural reverse, makes it possible to solve intergenerational conflicts in a post-revolutionary era or at least a non-violent revolutionary era. In my interview, because the older generation feels uncomfortable in the new social environment, they are surprised by the values, life attitudes, and behavior patterns of the younger generation. However, they gradually become tolerant and even receptive, so that cultural reverse becomes a powerful tool for them to adapt to the new era. For the younger generation, since the older one has increased their understanding and tolerance by receiving reverse, the homogeneity between generations is naturally enhanced, and mutual dissatisfaction or hostility disappears. The younger generation is discovering for the first time that the older one is neither recalcitrant nor defensive. Once they accept new things, they sometimes love new things more than themselves. NBM said that her mother used to hate her very much for wearing jeans and ballroom dancing, but when she retired, she became so addicted to disco that she refused to take off the old jeans that NBM did not wear (NBM, 1998). NMF, a professor of journalism and communication, also said that when he conducted telephone interviews with graduate students, he found that many elderly people learned shopping from their children and grandchildren. They went from opposing “Taobao” to later lingering in “Tmall” every day, buying a bunch of things that you cannot say are useful (NMF, 2013). Obviously, cultural reverse not only promotes the younger generation’s understanding of the “eccentric” elders, but also enables the older generation to understand the children who have “grown more and more disagreeable”, so that “learning from children” eventually becomes one of the important aspects of the older generation’s lifelong learning to adapt to the changing society (Sun, 1998: 243). Finally, the reason why cultural reverse can promote the common growth of the two generations is that it enables them to communicate, imitate, and learn from each other through the mutual tolerance of their multi-cultures, including intergenerational culture and intergenerational differences, and finally realize the harmony between them in the face of the ever-changing world. From 1946 to 1947, when Fei Xiaotong wrote the Fertility System and Rural China, he saw that the older generation, who had “the power of education to compel the young” (Fei, 1998: 67), began to encounter the embarrassment of adapting to difficulties in the era of rapid changes. At the same time, the younger generation who has been exposed to new ideas and technologies feels that it “can’t deny its hope and follow the predecessors in what they think is a dead end”. Although the wise prophet of sociology realized that “the rise and fall of generations and the change of society have played this heart-wrenching game in the hearts of many people” (Fei, 1998: 210), the emotional balance of Fei Xiaotong, who was 37 years old when facing the turbulence of the changing times, obviously more inclined to the young people emotionally:

126 What has been ushered in? In the process of social change, people cannot be guided by experience. What can be relied on is the principle beyond the individual situation, but it is not necessarily the elder who can form and apply the principle. This ability has little to do with age. What matters is expertise, intelligence, and a bit of opportunity. When it comes to opportunities, the younger ones have more than the older ones. They are not afraid of change, curious and willing to experiment. In change, habits are obstacles to adaptation, and experience equals stubbornness and backwardness. Stubbornness and backwardness are not mere verbal sneers, but threats to survival chances. (Fei, 1998: 68) While Fei firmly believes that the older generation will not only be laughed at, but even reduced in their ability to survive, if they fail to adapt to the changes of the new era, he hopes to build some kind of more harmonious relationship between two or more generations. As early as the 1920s, Robert Park, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, was inspired by William Wheeler’s work on ants (Wheeler, 1910: 339–424) to suggest that two types of beneficial social relationships can be established between people: (a) symbiosis, in which the secretions of aphids are good food for ants, and the aphids in turn are served by the ants (who take their aphids to suitable habitats), and they use each other, so that the relationship between these completely different insects can be regarded as a symbiosis (Park & Burgess, 1970: 87); (b) consensus, which is a relationship at a higher level than symbiosis that only exists in human society, and in which individuals are able to sacrifice their own interests for the benefit of other individuals. Park believed that mutual understanding and harmony were even more characteristic of human beings than cooperation or joint action (Park & Burgess, 1970: 84). Influenced by his teacher, Fei Xiaotong suggested that the most ideal intergenerational relationship should progress in this way: “The offspring is initially a physiological connection to the parents, then a symbiotic connection, and finally a harmonious connection” (Fei, 1998: 104). As far as we are concerned, cultural reverse is not a physiological link between offspring and parents, but a cultural link between generations. This association at the symbiosis level is not controversial. Passing on the meaning and skills of new things in fast-changing times to parents seems to only increase parents’ understanding of a changing society and their ability to adapt to it, though this understanding and adaptation, in turn, improves the children’s own insight into society and reduces their own growth barriers caused by parental confusion and anger. Therefore, we always firmly believe that cultural reverse is the basic way for two or three generations to grow together. So, does cultural reverse have the same positive implications in a uniquely human context of consensus? In terms of the way of inheritance from father to son in rural society, “the biggest difficulty for children is that they have no experience as parents . . . The experience one does not have cannot be extended to others” (Fei, 1998: 104–105). In this way, the premise of consensus is the

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mutual empathy of both sides of the interaction. In traditional China, the way of intergenerational communication is one way, so no matter what kind of devotion parents make to their children, children will first feel one-way indoctrination and even repression. Therefore, the kind of “overall consensus relationship” Fei Xiaotong hoped to achieve is difficult in traditional intergenerational communication. And thanks to cultural reverse, for the first time, our children are likely to be “on duty” in advance—to start acting as educators—in the process of feeding their parents. The change from educatee to educator may make some children arrogant and perverse, but for most it may provide a positive reflexive experience; that is, to reflect on their own behavior from the perspective of parents and reconstruct healthy or “consensus” intergenerational relationships. In other words, the basic socialization path of traditional paternity, coupled with cultural reverse, provides a realistic possibility for the intergenerational relationship to change from one-way control or suppression to two-way interaction and communication. Almost all of the cases we interviewed—be it the NG family in Nanjing in Chapter 3 of the first volume of this book, the GE family in Guangzhou in Chapter 4 of the first volume of this book, the SE family in Shanghai, the BN family in Beijing, or the CO family in Chongqing in Chapter 5 of the first volume of this book—all proved that cultural reverse not only promotes the rapid growth of the younger generation, but also improves the social adaptability of the older generation. As a result, cultural reverse has become an unprecedented remolding experience of intergenerational relationship that almost all Chinese families have experienced since the reform and opening-up in 1978.

Chinese feeling: from “only here” to “only once” So far, there is still a question worth discussing: Is the phenomenon of cultural reverse really a new way of cultural inheritance? Obviously, this is an unavoidable topic when discussing the social significance of the phenomenon of cultural reverse. In other words, what is the uniqueness of this phenomenon of intergenerational subversion in cultural inheritance if we examine it from the synchronic and diachronic perspectives? This is one of the most common questions I have heard since I first proposed and studied the concept of cultural reverse. This question actually includes two aspects. First, from the synchronic perspective, is the phenomenon of cultural reverse really unique to China? Specifically, in this study, a variety of new food and information communication technologies (ICTs) have appeared in developed Western countries and emerging East Asian countries in recent decades. Is there no cultural reverse of offspring to parents or “subversion” of cultural inheritance in these countries? Second, from the diachronic perspective, is the phenomenon of cultural reverse really unique to China today? In Chinese history, especially in those important historical periods such as “dynasty change”, is there no similar phenomenon that the younger generation backfeeds to the older generation? Let’s start with the first question. I still remember that in the discussions on this topic, since 1999, foreign scholars have asked me the same question.8

128 What has been ushered in? Apparently, they, like Nicholas Negroponte, the new media expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology we mentioned in Chapter 5 of the first volume of this book, saw that in front of various ICTs, the phenomenon that the parents are inferior to the children, or the elders are inferior to the young—that is, cultural reverse, as I call it—is a new phenomenon that has emerged globally with the promotion of ICTs. It does not seem to be unique to Chinese society. I admit that parents all over the world are likely to experience inferior performance to their children or younger generations when it comes to new gadgets or the use of ICTs. However, the particularity of Chinese society lies in the fact that it is a country whose tradition is deeply rooted and which has been subjected to numerous internal and external troubles since modern times and failed to undergo a proper modern baptism. After 30 years of isolation, stagnation, and even the regression of the Cultural Revolution, such a country suddenly faced reform and opening-up. Faced with such a modern outside world and such a drastic social transformation, the sharp contrast makes the process of the older generation from “supreme” to “backward” almost instantaneous. In addition to the rapidity of change, the difference between two and even three generations of Chinese society caused by change is unparalleled, not to mention the generation of the post-1920s to the post-1930s who are still alive today, the generation of the post-1940s, especially the generation of the post-1950s and post-1960s, who experienced a series of waves such as “rebellion”, joining the army, going to the countryside, returning to the city, being laid off, and seeking a career by themselves, though most people did not have the experience of modern higher education. However, those born after the Cultural Revolution or after the reform and opening-up, the so-called generation of the post-1970s to the post-1990s, have benefited from the rapid economic and social development in China over the past 42 years, enjoyed a good education and growth environment, and become the almost omniscient and omnipotent generation. Just look at this data: in 1977, when the college entrance examination was resumed after the Cultural Revolution, Chinese universities enrolled 278,000 students. Thirty years later, Chinese universities enrolled 5.67 million students in 2007. In just 30 years, enrollment has increased by a factor of 20, which means many families now face the embarrassment of having children who are “knowledgeable” and parents who are “know-nothings”.9 The differences between the lives of the children of the Great Depression and their children born after World War II in the 1930s are very similar to those between the Cultural Revolution generation and their children (Elder, 2002: 7), but it is clear that there is no such huge spiritual gap between the two generations in the United States as from “closed” to “open”. The contrast between the material and spiritual lives of two or three living generations at the same time is so huge that it determines that, in China, the traditional parent–child relationship is subverted more thoroughly than in any other country, which is why it is called “only here”. Of course, here, the so-called “only here” is only a relative metaphor, so it is not necessary to make an absolute understanding of it. For example, in a speech

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I gave at Ho Chi Minh National University in Vietnam in October 2011, a member of the audience told me that in Vietnam, which had been following China’s example of reform and in some ways was even more advanced, there was a similar phenomenon of cultural reverse. I was not surprised. The country, which in many ways resembles China, despite its wars and more tortuous development path, had changed dramatically since the reform and opening-up beginning in 1986. For example, the Ho Chi Minh city I visited, the charming city formerly known as Saigon, with its endless bars and cafes and the French atmosphere, is more modern than Nanjing, my hometown. So I answered positively, “I believe you. Maybe the next country is North Korea?” Indeed, if North Korea can one day embark on the path of reform and opening-up, and also achieve a great leap forward in a few short decades, it will surely have the same cultural reverse phenomenon as China and Vietnam. This is why I firmly believe that China, which has taken the first step on the road of reform and opening-up or social transformation, has produced economic and social development achievements and undergone great changes in its people’s spiritual world, which has a certain universal value for those developing countries with similar national conditions as China (Zhou, 2011b). In this sense, “only here” can also be understood as “only these few places”. Let’s move on to the second question. Not long after I put forward the concept of cultural reverse in 1988, Lu Jie, an educator, asked me whether there was really no such phenomenon in history. First, as early as in the Tang dynasty, Han Yu said: “It is not necessary for a disciple to be inferior to his teacher, or for a teacher to be superior to his disciple” (On Teaching 2013). Second, during the period of the May Fourth Movement in 1919 and the great social transformation (such as after the victory of the revolution in 1949 and even the Cultural Revolution in 1966), the younger generation often dominated the times, while the older generation was often left behind as the “old fogy”. Thus, the phenomenon of cultural reverse does not seem to be unique to China today. I also admit that in any era, due to the fact that “people learn their way in different times and specialize in different subjects”, and due to the difference in IQ and degree of effort, the phenomenon of disciples being stronger than teachers certainly exists, and it is also not uncommon for the father to be inferior to the son. I also admit that in those periods of great historical transformation, it is quite common for the younger generation to become the trendsetters of the times. However, the biggest difference between these two phenomena and what we call cultural reverse is: The former may exist as a specific case in a particular family or between particular teachers and students. The reason why parents are not as good as children or teachers is simply because some people “learn their way” early, while others learn late, the difference in profession, and the difference in IQ and diligence; or it may just exist in the realm of political or regime change, where acceptance of new political discourse or ideologies is often the result of a combination of social trends and personal circumstances, not entirely dependent on the single factor of age. On the contrary, the latter, what we call cultural reverse, is occurring on a large scale in the whole society

130 What has been ushered in? of China today. On the one hand, it does not depend on the time of learning, or the similarities and differences in the field, and even has nothing to do with intelligence and diligence, but only with the great changes in the living environment between generations in the past decades. On the other hand, the phenomenon that the parents are inferior to the children or the elders are inferior to the juniors is neither limited to the “remembering” and understanding of certain kinds of knowledge, or the mastery and alienation of a particular profession, nor limited to class positions or political choices; on the contrary, it involves almost all areas of daily life, such as values, life attitudes, behavior patterns, and object civilization. In other words, this all-round gap between parents and children or between generations is another version of what the American sociologist Ogburn called “cultural lag” (Ogburn, 1950: 200). I think only by realizing this can we truly understand the unprecedented historical significance of cultural reverse. In the history of the inheritance of human culture, cultural reverse has unique value, not only because it has never happened before, but also because it will not be repeated thereafter—it is “unprecedented and unique”, which is called “only once”. Obviously, the necessary condition for the phenomenon of cultural reverse is that the whole society has undergone drastic changes in a very short time, which has resulted in a huge gap between two or three generations living in the world at the same time. I remember when I visited Beijing, an ordinary fitter master BTF told me that none of the 40 or 50 workers in his workshop had gone to college, but now their children were all receiving college education (BTF, 2004). I acknowledge that society will continue on its journey of change, but after having seen many such cases that I am convinced that the great generational differences caused by the dramatic changes of the past few decades will not be repeated. In recent years, while paying attention to a series of experiences accumulated in China’s economic and social development and structural transformation, which is called the “Chinese experience” (Fan, 2005; Li, 2008; Wen, 2008),10 I also propose to pay attention to the equally great changes in Chinese people’s values and social mentality in these years—we call these changes the “Chinese feeling” (Zhou, 2009a, 2013, 2014a, 2014b). Just as the Chinese experience that people often talk about now, the “Chinese feeling”—that is, the micro-evolution of Chinese people’s values and social mentality in the past few decades—discussed here should certainly become one of the themes that must be taken care of by the sociology of transition, or rather it is a kind of transformational social psychology, or what Fang Wen calls “transformational psychology” (Fang, 2008). The significance and influence of China’s social transformation are not only reflected in the fact that it condenses many historical processes of human social changes, with implications of civilization transition (Sun, 2005), but that the generation or generations of people living in China in transition have undergone and condensed centuries of evolution in their short life cycle in a spiritual “duck-stuffing” manner, which is unprecedented for the spiritual or psychological reconstruction of these 1.3 billion people (Zhou, 2011b). All

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these have determined that the observation of the “Chinese feeling” and its significance has become an unavoidable historical mission of Chinese social psychology and even the whole of Chinese social science (Wang, 2012). Compared with the Chinese experience, the Chinese feeling is a brand new concept, which does not mean that we should replace the previous Chinese experience or other similar concepts, such as the Chinese road, the Chinese model, and the Chinese miracle. The novelty of the concept of the Chinese feeling on the one hand refers to that like the Chinese experience, it is also the result of the rapid changes or social transformation of Chinese society over the past few decades, so previous social scientists did not and could not pay attention to such a social phenomenon. On the other hand, it means that although Chinese feeling, like Chinese experience, is the result of social change or transformation, the former has not yet attracted enough attention compared with the latter. Few people realize that while the macro-economic and social structure of Chinese society is changing, the micro-values and social mentality of its people are also changing unprecedently. The Chinese experience and the Chinese feeling, as an integral part of this unprecedented social transformation that began in 1978, have endowed our unique era with complete historical significance and cultural value. If we simply sum up the Chinese experience and ignore the Chinese feeling, it is impossible to find out what role the spirit of the Chinese, as the main body of modernization, has played in this process involving 1.3 billion people; what changes have happened to their desires and personalities while they are changing China; how their social mentality of happiness and sorrow ebbs and flows with the changes of society; and what kind of embarrassment and loss they are facing in their spiritual world (Zhou, 2011b, 2013, 2014). In a series of papers published in recent years, I have repeatedly stated the basic connotation of the Chinese feeling. First, different from the Chinese experience, the Chinese path, the Chinese model, or the Chinese miracle, the Chinese feeling is not the structural or institutional macro-changes of Chinese society in the past few decades, but the micro-changes of Chinese people’s values and social mentality in the context of macro-changes. Second, the Chinese feeling includes both positive psychological experience and negative psychological experience. The former includes openness, mobility, competition, aggressiveness, peace, and tolerance, while the latter includes materialistic desire, money worship, impetuosity, indifference, lack of integrity, hatred, and flaunting of wealth (Zhou et al., 2014).11 The marginalization of personality or polarization of social mentality are just the most important characteristics of Chinese feeling, which indicates that it itself is a spiritual landscape of change to a certain extent. Third, although the Chinese feeling is a kind of personality and social psychological evolution that may occur in any society that changes from tradition to modernity, due to China’s specific population size, differences in economic and social structure before and after the transformation, a traditional culture with a long history, the promotion of globalization, and the speed of change, it has some characteristics that general spiritual evolution does

132 What has been ushered in? not have. These characteristics make social psychologists’ research into the evolution of the human spiritual world have new significance. Finally, while the Chinese feeling is unique, it is not without some universal significance; that is to say, this “feeling” may be useful for other ethnic groups or countries, especially the developing countries in upheaval, and some may even be copied to some extent. As Shi Zhiyu said, the results of Chinese research can be connected with “the universal law of human behavior” (Shi, 2006). If indeed the Chinese experience and the Chinese feeling can be regarded as two sides of the great change or social transformation that this ancient country is undergoing, and the understanding of change is inextricably linked with social science itself, which pays attention to the path and causes of change, then the study of the Chinese experience and Chinese feeling can not only promote the healthy development of Chinese social science, but also fundamentally provide a God-given opportunity to realize the sinicization of social science. It is precisely in terms of the unique significance that the transformation of Chinese society may have for human society that the dual care for the structure (Chinese experience) and significance (Chinese feeling) of the transformation not only provides an unprecedented opportunity to forge Chinese social science, but also may prevent the transformation from becoming a mere wealth growth or GDP accumulation. This will help lift the spiritual significance of this change on a global scale. If we look back over the 100-year history of social psychology, we can find at least two studies that have some historic value in explaining human behavior, especially social behavior, because they reveal the special significance of people’s spiritual evolution, making the transformation discussed by the authors and the changes of people born of transformation go beyond the simple significance of economic growth. The first study was The Protestant Ethic and the Spirits of Capitalism, written in 1904–1905 by Max Weber, a German sociologist. Clearly, in Weber’s view, the spirit of capitalism is a kind of spiritual power, or a kind of social mentality that emerged in the European and American world after the Protestant Reformation, which paved the way for the emergence of modern capitalism or the transformation of European and American societies. Before the emergence of the capitalist spirit, the so-called traditionalism dominated people’s life attitudes and behaviors, in which labor is just a means of making a living, which makes people not try to change the existing way of life as long as they can meet their habitual needs. However, the religious reform triggered the collapse of traditionalism. In addition to the change of people’s religious beliefs, it also promoted the change of their values and social psychology towards modernity, including the following. First is the change of career concept, that is, from the original concept of fate to the concept of calling. In Weber’s words, “the only way of living acceptably to God was not to surpass worldly morality in monastic asceticism, but solely through the fulfilment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world” (Weber, 2005: 40). Thus, secular behaviors have religious significance, and the struggle

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to earn money has a certain sanctity. The second is a change in the concept of money. If earning money and other worldly things are an unquestioned duty, attitudes to money also limit the spirit of capitalism in another way: The individual who is diligent in earning money must at the same time possess the ability to abstain, to be thrifty, to invest the money saved as new capital; only by realizing that money can beget money, that is to say, by realizing the selfreproduction of money, can an individual truly possess the concept of money in modern capitalism. The third is a change in the concept of time. Since our earthly life can add to the glory of God, there is no reason for us to slack off every moment. Thus Weber not only highly respected Franklin’s moral maxim that “time is money”, but also deeply believed that “waste of time is thus the first and in principle the deadliest of sins” (Weber, 2005: 104). Clearly, this view of time not only facilitated the precision of the measurement of time (including the invention of mechanical clocks, a hallmark of modernity), but later became the most important attitude in the entire capitalist management system. It is precisely this that brings about a shift in the patterns of human social behavior, which, in Weber’s words, leads to the emergence of instrumental or formal rational behavior. At this time, people’s behavior is no longer only based on tradition and emotion, or even the meaning and value of behavior. Instrumental rational behavior, which emphasizes efficiency and predictability, starts to become the main mode of human social behaviors. The second study, From Traditional to Modern Man: Personal Change in Six Developing Countries, was published in 1974 by U.S. sociologists Alex Inkeles and David Smith. The study, which was originally conducted in 1962–1964, looked at 6,000 farmers, industrial workers, and people in more traditional occupations in cities and towns in six countries: Argentina, Chile, India, Israel, Nigeria, and Bangladesh. The two sociologists wanted to show through this large-scale empirical study that people are not born with modernity, but that it is their particular experiences that drive the shift to modern success. Since man is the product of the social environment, then a man with modernity is the product of modern society. From this point of view, Inkeles and Smith first identified some of the increasingly salient factors typical of the six developing countries that could be called modern: the factory system, mass media, urban life, and modern education. Although the actual research process is complex, the basic conclusions are clear: Among such institutions, we gave prime emphasis to the factory as a school in modernity. We also thought that urban living and contact with the mass media should have comparable effects. While emphasizing such modes of experience as more characteristic of the modern world, we did not neglect to study education, which earlier research had shown to be a powerful predictor of individual modernity, as well as other personal attributes such as age, religion, ethnic membership, and rural origin. (Inkeles & Smith, 1975: 325)

134 What has been ushered in? Although the dualist view of the transition from tradition to modernity is controversial (Zhou, 2010), Inkeles and Smith’s study of “modern man” may also have the “ideological tint” of other modernization theories (Latham, 2003). This study at least reveals the indisputable fact that changes in the social environment bring about changes in people’s values and lifestyles, which also have distinct social significance: They are not the marginal benefits derived from the process of institutional modernization, but the prerequisites for the long-term operation of these institutions (Inkeles & Smith, 1975: 455). While we do not want to overstate the universality of these two studies, obviously they are all examples of how people observe the impact of social changes on the changes of human social psychology because they all reveal the spiritual shaping of their people by the special historical processes that took place in different countries or peoples at different stages of historical development. And the above general conclusion obtained by these two studies is also regarded as a general law of human behavior. The Chinese feeling deserves our academic attention because, on the one hand, it endows the Chinese experience with complete value and significance on the spiritual level, and because, on the other hand, “its uniqueness may provide a social or psychological model for developing countries around the world to make the transition from tradition to modernity” (Zhou & Qin, 2010a). Indeed, the phenomenon of cultural reverse and its associated intergenerational disruption is part of the psychological experience of the Chinese people as a result of this dramatic change. We realize that because China’s reform involves all aspects of society and touches upon the deepest problems of the latter, every researcher, no matter how intelligent or diligent he is, his concern may only touch on the very smallest areas of a changing society, and his discourse is also inevitably incomplete. However, no matter how small the power of individuals, we still hope that the research on the phenomenon of cultural reverse will leave an academic accumulation in the sense of knowledge sociology for the four decades of reform and opening-up and social progress.

Notes 1 Although Mao Zedong advocated cremation as early as the mid-1950s, the mandatory implementation of the policy appears to be related to the people’s communes and the Great Leap Forward, which began in 1958. Because of the Great Leap Forward, the country needed to expand the area of arable land and thus persuaded or even forced farmers to square graves, which was very similar to the “square graves and restore farming” in Zhoukou, Henan province in recent years (Ye, 2012). At the same time, the state also began to promote cremation and the construction of crematoria in rural areas. However, after 1962, the failure of the Great Leap Forward led to the adjustment of a series of extreme policies, and the country began to adopt a more moderate policy on funerals, and the earth burial was restored to a certain extent. However, the arrival of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 once again intensified the disappearance of the original funeral methods. After the reform and opening-up in 1978, although many other policies had been restored, funeral reform was

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basically adopted by the Chinese. This is discussed in Chapter 5 in Longevity: The Old in China and Communism (Davis-Friedmann, 1991: 61–67). In daily life, people are very clear about the core connotation of filial piety and strictly divide it into two fields: “service” and “obedience”. In my own case, I take great care of my mother in life, especially after the death of my father, but I often contradict many of her ideas. Thus, my mother often comments to me, “You are dutiful but not obedient.” Whether I accept my mother’s criticism or not, I have to admit that her division of the concept is quite accurate. Interestingly, the gender of the child can sometimes be a barrier for parents, especially fathers, to accept “feedback”. For example, BQF, a lawyer in a Beijing Telecom Company, said that if he had given birth to a son, he might have communicated with the child equally, but because he had only a daughter, he would be somewhat uncomfortable to listen to the child’s guidance (BQF, 2005). However, mothers generally do not have this “psychological barrier”; they often have an appreciative attitude towards their children’s “feedback”. In our interview in Guangzhou, the 12-year-old GAB, mentioned in Chapter 5 of the first volume of this book, also spoke grandly about this problem: “Although every time I know what my parents don’t know, I feel a sense of pride, I still respect them the same. Because they are my parents, after all, the people who gave me birth, and I don’t know much yet. I still need to consult them about most things, so I think I should be modest.” Upon hearing GAB say this, grandma GAGM suddenly “broke the news” and said, “But once you said, ‘You are retarded.’” Grandma’s words made GAB’s face turn red, arguing, “That’s just a joke! I really respect them in my heart” (GAB, 2003). This is the language of the Internet, which means “behind the times”. It is the homonym of Ultraman, a Japanese animated film made by TYO (Tsuburaya), which is very familiar to young people born in the 1980s. However, Ultraman is an omnipotent hero with a perfect life form and historical responsibility, while the “outman” of the real world is an outdated person unable to adapt to this changing society. Martin Whyte once compared Mao Zedong’s China to the “empire of blue ants”, thus corresponding to the “scattered sand” China of Sun Yat-sen (1924) and Chiang Kai-shek (1945) (Whyte, 1974: 2). Whatever other social features, monotony or uniformity was indeed one of the most striking features of daily life in the Mao era. During the May Fourth new culture movement, the rebellious young generation’s hatred of the older generation highlighted the sharp intergenerational conflict. As is known to all, Qian Xuantong, who was also the standard bearer of the new culture movement with Lu Xun, even said angrily, “A man should die at forty, or be shot if he is not dead.” So on the 41st birthday of Qian Xuantong on September 12, 1928, Hu Shi wrote a song named “Anniversary song of my deceased friend Qian Xuantong” to mock his theory that “one should be shot at the age of 40” (Liu, 2011). In fact, since the beginning of the reform, there have been countless thoughts of “nonfilial piety” that mock and even oppose the elderly. For example, the motto of Wu Zhihui, a reformist, is: “Stand on the side of the people to deny the monarch; stand on the side of the students to oppose the teacher; stand on the side of the youth to oppose the old” (Grieder, 1983: 177). In 1999, for example, in the office of Professor Elizabeth Perry, director of the Fairbank Center for East Asian Studies at Harvard University, she and Professor Deborah Davis, the visiting dean of sociology at Yale, talked to me about this. The two professors also suggested that I use the term “culture reverse”. In the conference “Understanding Cultures: The Use of Culture in China” held by the World University Union (WUN) in May 2011, Professor Gordon Houlden, dean of the School of Chinese Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada, and Professor David

136 What has been ushered in? Goodman, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, also asked the same question. 9 According to the latest statistics, the number of college students in China reached 8.20 million in 2019. In fact, what changes is not only the number of students admitted, but also the proportion of students admitted. In 1977, the number of examninees was 5.7 million, 270,000 were admitted, and the admission rate was 4.7%. But in 2019, there were 10.31 million examinees and 8.20 million students were admitted. The enrollment rate has reached 79.53%. In just 42 years, the two generations have different chances of going to college, which fully shows that the reform and opening-up initiated by Deng Xiaoping has created completely different life circumstances for the two generations. 10 Although it is called the “Chinese experience”, I agree with Li Peilin that the phrase “not only refers to ‘achievements’, but also includes lessons, including all the special experiences along the development path” (Li, 2008). 11 In order to elaborate on the changes of Chinese people’s social mentality and the marginal or polarized characteristics of what we call the Chinese feeling, I hosted a pen discussion entitled “Social mentality of contemporary Chinese people” in the fifth and sixth issues of Journal of Jiangsu Administrative College in 2014. In ten essays, the eight authors discussed five positive social attitudes, namely openness, mobility, competition, peace, and inclusiveness, and five negative social attitudes, namely anxiety, material desire (money worship), impetuousness, violence, and flaunting wealth (Zhou et al., 2014).

5

Conclusion State, society, and intergenerational relations

Youth, like spring, like the rising sun, like the budding flowers, is the most precious time in one’s life. The youth to the society is the fresh and active cells to the body. Metabolism makes the stale and perishable to be always replaced by the fresh and lively. Health follows metabolism, and death follows decayed and dead cells; society flourishes if it follows the metabolic pattern, and it perishes if it is clogged with decrepit elements. Chen 1916

The metamorphosis of youth Cultural reverse is a new phenomenon in Chinese society following the reform and opening-up in 1978—in Chapter 4, we used “only here” and “only once” to show its novelty, which reflects, from one side, the remarkable changes that have taken place in a country with a history of 5,000 years of civilization. On the micro-level, cultural reverse involves a change in the path and direction of cultural inheritance within the family and between generations. The offspring turns from the educatee to the educator in daily life or in the process of socialization, while the status of the parents changes in the opposite direction. On the macro-level, cultural reverse involves changes of the historical status of young people, changes in the relationship between young people and the state and society, as well as changes in the way of cultural innovation and inheritance in such an ancient country as China. Now, after we have made detailed analysis and discussion of cultural reverse and its microcosmic mechanism, it is necessary to further discuss at the macro-level the influence this phenomenon has on the contemporary change of Chinese social intergenerational relations and the future development of the whole nation. In daily life, when people talk about “youth”, they will naturally regard it as an age group associated with the growth of life and a social counterpart to adults. The continuous enlargement of the age range or boundary demarcation of this group, however, shows most clearly the social constructive significance of this group.1 In other words, as an age group, the emergence of youth itself, as well as the determination and change of its specific age range, are all the products of social structure and its changes since the Industrial Revolution. DOI: 10.4324/9781003024309-5

138 Conclusion Before that, infancy and childhood were followed immediately by adulthood; in other words, there were only two age groups in traditional society: the underage and the grown-up, and there was no transitional period called “youth”. Therefore, “youth” in the sociological sense can be, as Bourdieu put it, “just a word” (Bourdieu, 1993: 94–95), or, as John R. Gillis put it, a product of modern industrial society (Gills, 1974: 3). Furthermore, since it emerged in the transition between the modern school system and the factory system, youth is endowed with an inherent dissociation from or opposition to the existing social structure, and thus becomes “a key point for social and political anxiety” (McRobbie, 2005: 175). As we have discussed in Chapter 1 of the first volume of this book, the emergence of youth as a result of the Industrial Revolution and its challenge to the older generation not only led to the rupture or discontinuity between generations, but also made the “generation” or intergenerational succession become a problem—which Simmel called the problem of modernity—for the first time in human history. In traditional Chinese society, before the emergence of modern education, there was no youth in the modern sense; what’s more, for certain reasons, young people were more attached to their households, families, and even society than those of other countries or nations. These reasons include the following. First, in traditional China, there was no clear age limit for education, marriage, property inheritance, or productive labor. In fact, generational or family hierarchy was of more importance than age. Second, Chinese traditional culture did not encourage young people to stay away from their parents: “When parents are at home, do not travel far” (Yang 1980) was the filial piety or virtue advocated by society. This, coupled with the fact that marriage was arranged by the parents and property was controlled by them, led to the attachment of the younger generation to the family or parents. Third, in addition to their own households, young males were also required to remain in the family to inherit the family genealogies after adulthood. Family membership was the most important identity of individuals, which also led to the family’s de facto control of each individual. Finally, until the Qing dynasty, there was no peer group for young people, and such groups were in fact strictly prohibited in schools (Chen Yingfang, 2007: 2–12). The change of Chinese society and the birth of youth as a result of it generally began when China was forced to cross the threshold of modernity due to the invasion of the West in modern times. While such an assertion, according to Paul Cohen, may sound more or less Western-centric (Cohen, 1989: 133), it indicates to some extent that the transformation from traditional agricultural civilization to modern industrial civilization caused by external forces is really the macroscopic background for the emergence of youth in the sociological sense. Further, Chen Yingfang divided this macro-background into two major opportunities: The national crisis caused by the impact of the West, and the educational reform that resulted from the eastward spread of Western learning. In Table 5.1, we can see the internal correlation between the two opportunities. The driving force behind the education reform was actually the national crisis,

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Table 5.1 External strikes and educational reform Events (Wars, etc.)

Innovations and Reforms

Modern Education

Studying Abroad

The Opium War (1840–1842)

The Second Opium War (1850–1860)

“To learn from the developed countries so as to overtake them” The Westernization Movement

Westernization schools

The government sends students to America The government sends students to France and Britain Studying in Japan

The Sino-French War (1884)

The Westernized Chinese style

Birth of modern schools (government, private, church)

The Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895) The Eight-Power Allied Forces’ invasion of China (1900–1901) The Revolution of 1911

The Hundred Days’ Reform New Policies

Advocating educational reform Abolishing the imperial The rise of studyexamination and reform- abroad fever ing the educational system The rapid development of modern education

which we explored in detail in the section “The dawn of revolution” in Chapter 2 of the first volume of this book. In the more than 70 years from 1840 to 1911, a series of wars, from the Opium War, the Second Opium War, the Sino-French War to the Sino-Japanese War and the Eight-Power Allied Forces’ invasion of China, rocked the Chinese empire, which had thought it was mighty; but this led to reforms and innovations at a different level, among which modern education reform was key. We must not limit the significance of educational reform to the field of education. It is obvious that the establishment of modern schools, the reform of the education system, the sending of students overseas, and the abolition of the imperial examination system in 1905 shook the Confucian ethics that had dominated China for thousands of years and finally triggered the 1911 Revolution that led to the collapse of the Qing dynasty. Compared with the national crisis caused by external forces, educational reform was more of a “midwife” that contributed to the birth of youth in modern China. It was the national crisis that led a large number of people with lofty ideals to realize the importance of transforming traditional Chinese education and cultivating scholars and students adaptable to the new era. As Zhang Zhidong said: “I believe that China is not poor in wealth but in talent, not weak in soldiers but in ambition” (Zhang, 1920: 1). At the same time when Zhang Baixi, Rong Qing, Zhang Zhidong, Yuan Shikai, and others

140 Conclusion urged the government to “reduce imperial examinations and pay more attention to schools”, led by Westernization schools, the upsurge of new education appeared. By 1911, around the outbreak of the 1911 Revolution, there were tens of thousands of new-style schools with 1.6 to 3.0 million students (Chen, 1992: 249; Xiong, 1994: 297), including 750,000 students above secondary school. “As a new social group, the ‘student class’ has been formed in China” (Chen Yingfang, 2007: 30–31), which was also the prelude for youth to step onto the historical stage of Chinese society. It has been more than 100 years since the official debut of youth in China. This was also the centenary of the Chinese nation’s rise from “being beaten” and humiliated to struggling and then to becoming the world’s leading nation. In the course of the past 100 years, the youth of China has always been supporting our nation, experiencing suffering, but also gaining in temperance. In “Youth” and Social Changes in China, Chen Yingfang described the transformation process of Chinese youth in the first half of the 20th century, and called two successive generations of them “radical youth” and “revolutionary youth” (Chen Yingfang, 2007: 180). In The Fourth Generation, Zhang Yongjie and Cheng Yuanzhong divided the Chinese communists into four generations from 1921, when they “struggled to seize state power”, up to 1985, and described in detail the transformation process of Chinese youth following the “revolutionary youth”. The first generation were the revolutionaries of the older generation headed by Mao Zedong, and the last generation were the increasing number of students who swarmed into colleges and universities with the tide of reform and opening-up. In between were “our fathers who are in their 50s, unsmiling, solemn, reserved, and serious about everything—be it good or bad—they do”, and “those notorious rebels, the world-famous ‘red guards’, and the first batch of candidates after the restoration of the National Entrance Examination” (Zhang & Cheng, 1988: 61). Ten years later, in The Fifth Generation, Wu Junping extended the narrative of the metamorphosis of youth to the post-1970s and post-1980s: They are different from the fourth generation in that they grow up in the environment of reform and opening-up, and have little memory of the traditional shackles, which distinguishes them not only from the fourth generation, but also from the previous three generations. (Wu, 1998: 7) The above intergenerational discussions on the transformation of Chinese youth not only follow one another in time, but also hold basically the same narrative position: the same generation “has experienced some major historical events together, and produced the same ideas, values, attitudes, behaviors and interests” (Li, 2013: 18). In the construction of youth studies discourse, we are familiar with and agree with the basic narrative of intergenerational theory. In Chapter 1 of the first volume of this book, we have already stated that the theory of intergenerational

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relationship from Mannheim to Margaret Mead is one of the three theories cited and discussed in this book. We agree that major historical events are the criteria for defining “generations”, especially “social generations”, but due to the homogeneity of a large number of historical events, even major historical events, we are more inclined to “package” some major historical events and discuss the influence of major historical periods rather than the historical events that occurred in them on generation division. Thus, we think that if we talk about the transformation history of Chinese youth over the past 100 years, following Chen Yingfang’s “radical youth” and “revolutionary youth”, the more characteristic intergenerational groups are “rebel youth” and “secular youth”. From radical youth to revolutionary youth and rebel youth, to the secular youth formed by the post-1970s, post-1980s, and even the post-1990s, who grew up after the reform and opening-up—this should constitute the complete transformation history of Chinese youth over the past 100 years. Radical youth were a generation of young people active on the stage of Chinese history in the first 30 years of the 20th century, including not only some from before and after the national revolution, but also Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and other first-generation Chinese communists. The failure of the Reform Movement of 1898 and the May Fourth Movement in 1919 were the two important points in the gradual radicalization of the newly grown Chinese youth. The Qing dynasty’s killing of the six gentlemen of the Reform Movement of 1898, such as Tan Sitong, and the Kuomintang’s fascist rule after 1927, were the two major boosters that led to the radicalization of the young generation. Unlike Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and even Tan Sitong, the radical youth, though deeply influenced by the former, were no longer “reformers” but “revolutionaries” determined to overthrow the Qing government and even all the old systems. However, from 1898 to 1910, when failures followed and the sense of collective purpose became unsustainable, these values were translated into a certain level of individual behavior, and revolutionary heroism gradually controlled the imagination of the radicals (Grieder, 1983: 228). In 1905, 30-year-old Chen Tianhua jumped into the sea in Tokyo, and in 1906, 27-yearold Yao Hongye jumped into the river in Shanghai. Out of resentment toward the tyranny of their rulers and a cult of violent revolution, radical youths carried out a wave of assassinations and an uprising. In 1905, Wu Yue, 27, assassinated the “five foreign ministers” and was beheaded; in 1907, Xu Xilin, 34, and Qiu Jin, 32, died willingly for their failed uprising; in 1910, Wang Jingwei, 27, went north to assassinate Regent Zaifeng; in 1911, Peng Jiazhen, 25, assassinated Liang Bi, the leader of Zongshetang. The “radical” tendency of people to be heroes of the world at the turn of the century was expressed most vividly in “The assassination era” by Wu Yue: To look to Europe in the west, and to Japan in the east, you can see that every revolution is preceded by assassinations. . . . Today is the era of assassinations by my comrades, and tomorrow is the revolution time of our nationality. He that would reap the fruit of the future must sow the seed of

142 Conclusion today…. If there is a better reason to live than to die, then live; if death can bring hope to the living, then die. To live when you should live and to die when you should die, and this is called life and this is a real hero. (Wu, 1907: 7–8; 27) The outbreak of the 1911 revolution did not completely change Chinese social realities, but it did cause the Chinese society to fall apart. In 1919, after the May Fourth Movement, anarchism, nihilism, Marxism, socialism, nationalism, liberal democracy, and fascism, which were previously popular among young people, were further advocated and practiced by more youth intellectuals due to the decline of old ideas and old traditions. From then until the 1930s and even the 1940s, among emerging young people, especially young intellectuals, there was a growing trend of radicalization, which was manifested in the spread of Marxism and the rise of the communist movement, the development and radicalization of the left-wing cultural movement, and the radicalization of the student movement (Chen Yingfang, 2007: 84). Although there were various reasons for the radicalization of Chinese youth, as Liu Zaifu said, the spread of Marxism and its class struggle theory in China was indeed an important motivation.2 Furthermore, after 1937, due to the invasion of Japan, China, which was already in a state of turmoil, as it had been throughout modern times, was plunged into a catastrophe. As a result, the duet of “enlightenment and salvation” played by Chinese youth since the May Fourth Movement had produced a “variation”: Not only did salvation for survival replace the cultural “enlightenment” with the theme of anti-feudalism, but in fact, as Li Zehou said, “traditional old ideology” “quietly infiltrated in a disguised way” (Li, 1987: 7), and finally “salvation overpowered enlightenment and peasant revolution overpowered modernization” (Li, 1994: 10). In the late 1930s, “revolutionary youth” began to appear on the historical stage. On the one hand, it was the natural result of the above-mentioned theme of salvation for survival; on the other hand, it was also the product of the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, which began to abandon the previous “closed-door” intellectual policy and became determined to systematically forge the younger generation. In terms of the former aspect, more and more young intellectuals entered the liberated areas to join the Chinese revolution led by the Communist Party of China (CPC) because they had devoted themselves to the Anti-Japanese War and the subsequent war of liberation for the purpose of saving the nation; in terms of the latter aspect, the CPC also made great efforts to attract young intellectuals to the revolution. Not only was the recruitment advertisement of the Chinese People’s Anti-Japanese Military and Political College pasted on every lamp post from Yan’an to Xi’an, but also Yan’an made a promise of “freedom to come and go” to young intellectuals, and then improved their treatment in the border area under the extremely difficult economic conditions. The change of the policy further determined popular sentiment. In just five years from 1938 to 1943, more than 40,000 intellectuals arrived in Yan’an, while in 1943, there were no more than 30,000 student Party

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members among the more than 1 million members of the Kuomintang. The latter were “obviously defeated in the great political battle for intellectual youth” (Pei, 2013). After the 1940s, the young intellectuals who went to Yan’an later became the most active grassroots cells and backbone of the CPC. They went deep into the vast Chinese countryside and effectively organized and mobilized millions of peasants, finally laying the foundation for the victory of the Chinese revolution. It should be pointed out that, compared with previous radical youth, revolutionary youth not only had a lower educational and family background, but also no longer pursued the “individual standard” and “liberal orientation” that the latter once pursued at the cost of their lives as the enlightenment theme weakened. This made it possible for Mao Zedong and the Chinese communists to successfully discipline young intellectuals to conform to the Party’s goals. In fact, after the “Yan’an rectification” in 1942, the political role of young intellectuals shifted from the organizer and mobilizer of Chinese workers and peasants to the “integrator”, and then to the “recipient” or “transformed” of the workers’ and peasants’ culture after the 1960s. The historical role of the youth, at least that of the “leading role”, was replaced by the young workers and peasants. Do not underestimate the political significance of “combining with workers and peasants” for the transformation or metamorphosis of Chinese youth from being radical to being revolutionary. In fact, during the whole 20 years from 1940 to 1960, the criterion for judging whether a youth was revolutionary or not was closely related to the political requirement set by Mao Zedong in his 1939 article “The direction of the youth movement”, mentioned in Chapter 2 of the first volume of this book: To judge whether a young person is revolutionary, what should be used as the standard? How to identify him? There is only one criterion, and that is to see whether he is willing to integrate himself with the broad masses of workers and peasants and whether he will do so or not. Those who are willing and practice integration with workers and peasants are revolutionary; otherwise they are non-revolutionary or counter-revolutionary. (Mao, 1967b: 530) The victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 did not change the criterion for judging the revolutionary youth, but the succession problems caused by the establishment of the revolutionary cause still endowed it with new historical connotations, especially after the 20th CPC National Congress in 1956. At that time, revolutionary youth were defined as “successors to the communist cause”, and “the communist youth league of China”, composed of revolutionary youth, was “a mass organization of advanced youth led by the communist party of China. It is the assistant and reserve army of the communist party of China” (Communist Youth League of China, 2013). In order to instill in the younger generation the political expectations of the state, and to help shape their imaginations or expectations of individual roles in accordance with the expectations of

144 Conclusion the state, after 1949, the state set out a series of examples of revolutionary youth such as Lei Feng, Ouyang Hai, Xing Yanzi, Dong Jiageng, and “Beijing youth commandos”, supplemented by various political ceremonies (Cheng, 2008; Whyte, 1974) to prevent “peaceful evolution”3 and to create “successors” to the proletarian revolutionary cause. Although Mao Zedong took precautions to prevent “peaceful evolution”, before the third and fourth generations of the CPC took over, he became deeply alienated from his own chosen successors in the party, and in 1966 vowed to launch a proletarian cultural revolution to replace Liu Shaoqi, the president he no longer trusted. Unlike Stalin’s personal terror, as we explained in Chapter 2 of the first volume of this book, Mao Zedong used the Red Guards or “rebel youth” as a tool to bring down his political opponents, and received 11 million Red Guards in ten batches eight times between August 18 and November 25, 1966. Mao Zedong’s eight interviews with the Red Guards, together with his previous letter to those of the High School Affiliated to Tsinghua University on July 30, “Long live the revolutionary and rebellious spirit of the proletariat” and “Again on the revolutionary and rebellious spirit of the proletariat”, put the Red Guards on the political stage. Within two years, the Red Guard Movement shocked the world in a way unheard of in human history. Although the movement marked by the “great rebellion” lasted for a little more than two years, its spirit of rebellion and its subsequent influence were continuously spread, and it has been revived again and again by the social ideals and political practices of Bo Xilai and his kind to this day. From the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 to the Tiananmen Square political turmoil in 1989, “rebel youth” with high political enthusiasm experienced the roller-coaster of political turbulence, and thus “turned their innocent hearts into a political block” (Zhang & Cheng, 1988: 98). As a result of the rupture of history, as well as the alienation of the subsequent “secular youth” from politics, and the consequent decline of their desire to live within the system—though this generation “born in the new society and growing up under the red flag” paid too much price for the “rebellion”, especially the “going to the mountains and countryside”—some of them, especially the college-educated elites after 1978, actually extended their prime time. From the beginning of the 1980s when they came out of the campus to today, the reform and opening-up of four decades has become the background of their personal growth and social performance. “Secular youth” entered the stage of history after Deng Xiaoping’s “southern tour speech” officially launched China’s transition to a market economy in 1992. Despite the numerous major historical events that have occurred in Chinese society during 1978–2020, from the point of view of this major historical period, with the gradual depoliticization of social life, market-oriented or paneconomic factors began to become the main axis of life. After 1978, economic construction replaced the class struggle of Mao Zedong’s era as the focus of both official and civil concern; moreover, due to the direct correlation between such economic incentive policies and individual benefits, the exogenous “anxiety” of the leaders of the CPC who wanted to catch up with the world powers

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in a short period of time after 1949 was successfully transformed into the daily endogenous anxiety of individual citizens for the first time (Zhou et al., 2014). After the Tiananmen Square turbulence in 1989, strong political control and positive economic guidance made the focus of Chinese people, especially the younger generation, increasingly turn toward economic life. Chinese society began to transform from a politicized society to a secular one, and after 1992, it gradually became a society with a distinct mercantilism. The secularization of social life has changed the social basis for generations of radical youth. The transformation of the whole society from traditional to modern, from planned economy to market economy, and from closed to open, also provides an opportunity for the transformation of the younger generation from radical to secular. To be specific, first, because of the progress of reform and opening-up, the young generation or secular youth who have grown up over the past few decades have become more and more rational. They believe more in science and replace the theological dogmas that governed daily life with the principles of reason; they doubt everything, have a critical spirit, and therefore become “alternatives” to the adult world. Second, because they have been familiar with the rules of the market economy since childhood and immersed in the atmosphere of that economy, they have developed not only an awareness of competition and risk, but also the mentality of utilitarianism and the code of conduct of pursuing sensory enjoyment. In the eyes of adult society, they are even “the most spoiled generation” or “the most selfish generation”, in other words, the typical “beat generation”. Third, because of the one-child policy launched in the 1980s, most secular youth, especially urban youth, are either the only child or at least live in families with few children. The inclination of the family intergenerational center nourishes their distinct personality, and the improvement of material conditions also indulges their pursuit of all kinds of fashion, which not only coincides with the noisy multicultural atmosphere that followed the 1980s, but also promotes the development of multiculturalism to a certain extent—from the “Super Voice Girls” who sing as they like, to Ma Nuo who said in the dating show If You Are the One that she would rather cry in a BMW than laugh on a bicycle, the diversity and eccentricity of cultures and values has reached a point that the adult world, which continues to dominate mainstream society, is amazed.4 Finally, because of the endless emergence of various information communication technologies (ICTs) over the past decades, especially the development of electronic computers and network technology, the button has become the most realistic existence in the world of secular youth. This horizontal knowledge association has abandoned the traditional vertical accumulation of human knowledge, narrowed the distance between the world, expanded the horizon and activity scope of the younger generation, and, most importantly, provided an open space for self-expression for Chinese youth. The reversal of the social image of secular youth occurred in 2008, when the post-1970s began to enter middle age successively, the first group of the post1990s just entered youth, and the post-1980s became the backbone of secular youth. The Wenchuan earthquake and the Beijing Olympic Games provided

146 Conclusion a good opportunity for the post-1980s of secular youth to replace the previous confrontation and rebellion with cooperation and participation. Two years later, the Shanghai World Expo paved the way for the post-1990s to take the stage, so that the Olympic generation and Expo generation became the nicknames of secular youth. Even Li Zehou, who is always sharp, praised the post-1990s generation in his article “Answers to aesthetic education as a substitute for religion” written in 2006, saying that “the post-90s generation seems to be plain and indifferent, showing no affinity to others, and even being disobedient and playful, but they can stand up at any time, being tenacious and willing to take responsibility regardless of life and death” (Zheng, 2014). At this point, people finally see some hope in the transformation of Chinese youth over the past 100 years, although we will see that they still struggle to grow up in the crevice that exists between the state and society.

Growing up in the crevice between state and society There are many historical and realistic ways to describe the transformation of youth, but as the transitional form between modern school system and factory system created by the Industrial Revolution, youth naturally has some tension of dissociation and opposition with social structure. If the social structure in reality is constructed by the interaction between the state and society, then young people in the modern sense exist in the crevice that lies between the state and society from the very beginning, and their growth space is to some extent endowed by the trade-off between the two. In modern times, when young people appear on the stage of Chinese history, the Chinese empire they faced, though dying on the outside through harsh political rule and the social network woven with the traditional Chinese family system, became a powerful restraining force for the younger generation to play a historical role as an independent force. As we have explained in Chapter 2 of the first volume of this book, traditional Chinese society formed the habit of living together because of their dependence on the land; and because of the economic activity of farming, the family became the basic productive unit. Further, on this basis, the importance of the household, the family, and the clan based on blood relationship was formed. Because they lived in families, the patriarch or leader of the family was often the dominant one in the local society or community. In general, these dominators were not only experienced elders within the family, but also often those who understood that Confucian culture had the power to educate “and thus acquire knowledge of the management of social affairs” (Zhang, 1991: 1)—the so-called “gentry” class. The gentry at first consisted of two distinct social components: the scholars, who were composed of imperial officials, and the gentry, officials who had retired from their posts and lived in rural areas. However, in modern China, the gentry class has merged into one social class (Qiao, 1992: 170). Because this class acted as the spokesman or moral embodiment of Confucian culture, it was respected and trusted by the people within the group and its members often became the actual leaders in

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local society or the rural community. In the Ming and Qing dynasties, although the government was able to intervene in the life of the grassroots through the official system up to the county level, the basic social operation and governance functions were assumed by the gentry class. To borrow Fei Xiaotong’s words, the consensual power of local society embodied by the gentry connects the violent power represented by the state with the patriarchal power generated by the succession of the family (Fei, 1998: 76). Therefore, in traditional China, “the suppression of young people is not only based on the organization, system and ethics of the family, but also on the background of gentry domination and the political system of the country based on it” (Chen Yingfang, 2007: 22). It can be said that it is the family organizations controlled by the gentry that successfully transformed the filial piety within the family to loyalty to the monarch. After the 1911 Revolution, not only did Yuan Shikai still respect Confucius and read scriptures and dream of restoration, but even after the Kuomintang formally took over state power in the 1920s, based on the need to maintain rule and resist the increasingly fierce communist tide, the national government did not actually touch the old social structure. Not only did the triad of clan power, gentry power, and political power, which had been the basis of political governance since the Ming and Qing dynasties, remain the same, but the Bao-Jia system of “households”, which had been practiced for a long time in feudal times, was still in use. And the Confucian family ethic was still used to rule and educate young people; as we pointed out in Chapter 4, loyalty and filial piety was still the foundation of the country. The isomorphic pattern of family and state of traditional Chinese patriarchal society makes the first old wall encountered by the younger generation who had just stepped onto the stage of history at the beginning of the 20th century was their own family and its related old systems including filial piety. In this way, it is quite normal that the rebellion against parents and family naturally became the common action of logic of the generation of radical youth. Although love, marriage, and family constituted the main contents of the so-called “troubles of youth”, they essentially reflected the contradictions and conflicts between generations, behind which was the difference between the old and the new ages. The emergence and rapid growth of modern schools, and the continuous emergence of such public spheres as newspapers, radio, trendy publications, business associations, civil society groups, parties, shopping malls, cafes, museums, public hospitals, and racecourses, gave birth to a growing number of young intellectuals who were receptive to new cultures and ideas, while the social structures, including the family, became increasingly intolerable. In this way, the young generation’s resistance to the old system naturally focused on the pursuit of freedom of marriage, and an indictment of the feudal patriarchal system including the patriarchy and the “cannibalistic ethics” centered on filial piety. In a word, from “resisting the family to reforming the society”. In fact, whether it was Wu Yu, Shi Cuntong, Mao Zedong, or Ba Jin, the discontent with society and the state of their generation of “radical youth” was initially born out of contradictions and conflicts with their own families and with their fathers or the patriarchs of their families.5

148 Conclusion Furthermore, if the traditional Chinese family doctrine advocates patriarchy and filial piety, which has a distinct authoritarian tendency, it is not only consistent with the autocratic rule of the state that has lasted for thousands of years, but also the breeding place of absolutism. All these have determined that all the actions of radical youth are characterized by a distinct anti-authority. In a sense, the radicalization of radical youth is not only manifested in the worship of violence, such as assassination and riot, but also in the denial and contempt of all authority. In his book Intellectuals and Modern China, the American historian Jerome Grieder said of another anti-Confucius pioneer, Wu Zhihui, that the events of that year, and the Boxer disaster two years later, brought him to an outspokenly antiauthoritarian position: side with the people in any dispute with the monarchy, was his motto; side with the students in any dispute with their teachers; side with the younger generation in any dispute with the older generation. Such opinions were a trifle advanced for turn-ofthe-century Shanghai. (Grieder, 1983: 155) It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this is the attitude shared by the generation of radical youth. After 1937, although the Kuomintang was still the ruler of Chinese society in the non-occupied areas, especially in the national-controlled areas, the “holy land” in the mind of Chinese young intellectuals was Yan’an. For the Chinese Communist Party headed by Mao Zedong, on the one hand, after the outbreak of the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, not only the extreme demand for talent made them realize that “whoever gets the intellectuals gets the world”, but also the formation of the situation of “national resistance against Japanese aggression” after the “Xi’an incident” also gained legitimacy for the competition for talent, so, attracted and inspired by various positive policies, thousands of intellectuals fled to Yan’an from all over the world, the youngest being 12 or 13 years old . . ., including university professors, engineers, and journalists of all parties and factions, and even miss Shanghai, who loves to eat and dance, pregnant young women, and overseas Chinese returning from southeast Asia. (Pei, 2013) This naturally prepared a talent pool for the expansion of the Communist Party’s influence and the subsequent success of revolution. On the other hand, the influx of so many young intellectuals into Yan’an and other base areas not only brought security risks and financial pressure, but also brought difficulties in education and discipline. Not mentioning liberal writers like Wang Shiwei, Xiao Jun, and Ding Ling and general intellectual youth, even Zhou Yang, the leader of the left-wing writers, who always paid attention to keeping in line with the Party and its leaders subjectively, initially had strong anti-authority and

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personal freedom tendencies as the spiritual successor of the May Fourth generation. Xiao Jun thought that there was a sense in Tolstoy’s character of rebelling against established authority and wanting to be a “king”, “very much like himself” (Yang, 2014). Zhou Yang was also fascinated by Nietzsche’s philosophy when he was in college. In his own words, Nietzsche “taught me to boldly deny all conventionalism, tradition and authority” (quoted from Xu, 2010: 36). Although the leaders of the Chinese revolution, including Mao Zedong, were at first radical youths who opposed authority, now, based on the organizational need to compete with the Kuomintang for the world, and the individual need to establish his own prestige in the party, educating and disciplining the younger generation, especially the young intellectuals, to obey the organization and its leaders became the primary task of the surging revolutionary cause. Against this practical background, Mao Zedong was naturally convinced that young intellectuals “should be well educated and guided to gradually overcome their weaknesses in the long-term struggle so as to make them revolutionary and become mass” (Mao, 1967c: 582). The intention of forging or disciplining the revolutionary youth coincided with the mass production movement that began before and after, and thus achieved a perfect form of expression. The large-scale production movement, which started from the production mobilization meeting of the Party, government, and army in Yan’an in February 1939 and reached its climax two years later when the 359 brigade entered Nanniwan for reclamation, was originally aimed at breaking the economic blockade of the Shanxi–Gansu–Ningxia border area by the Kuomintang, but it was quickly transformed into a way to reform and discipline the population in the liberated areas, especially the young intellectuals who poured in from the nationalized areas, by means of “labor”. We have mentioned that since the May Fourth Movement, young intellectuals had always taken it as their duty to save the old China from fire and water, and formed a tradition of “enlightenment” aimed at opening up people’s wisdom, but this was completely overturned by Mao Zedong’s recipe of “combining with workers and peasants”. The mass production movement reinforced the idea that no one can eat unless he or she works. However, by limiting labor to manual labor, the value and power of knowledge was denied, and, as a result, a large number of young intellectuals who once regarded themselves as very high lost their original self-identity and became self-deprecating, while accepting the arranged destiny of transformation through labor (Zhou Haiyan, 2013: 163). When discussing the discipline of power on the body, Foucault wrote, “the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body” (Foucault, 2012: 26). In the early 1940s, when the mass production movement forced the young intellectuals to be “reborn” through physical labor, the rectification movement had just begun in time to reform the minds of leaders at all levels and young intellectuals through a series of ways to forge “new people”. Although the core of Yan’an rectification was to destroy the foundation and influence of the “dogmatic sect” headed by Wang Ming and

150 Conclusion others in the Party, its essence was “to carry out ideological transformation of the majority of party members and cadres—to transform their ideological consciousness with Mao Zedong’s theories and concepts” (Gao, 2010: 177). In addition to gentle means, such as studying documents, writing introspective notes, and filling in “small broadcast questionnaires”,6 the rectification also rapidly promoted violent means as the movement was carried out further, such as political review of cadres, anti-espionage campaigns, accounts of personal history, and the “pants off and tails off” movement for self-disclosure and self-prosecution. Strong group pressure finally made all the participants, especially the young intellectuals who were touched the most, convinced and began to unconditionally agree with the Party’s principles and leadership authority. As Wei Junyi reflected more than 50 years later: After that, “I gave up everything I got from reading. I preferred to be a fighter with superficial knowledge and firmly believe everything Lenin, Stalin and Mao Zedong say, because it is the doctrine I worship” (Wei, 1998b: 3). With the transition from radical youth to revolutionary youth, the attitude of the younger generation to authority also changed from denial and rebellion to submission or worship; of course, it was the new communist authority—Mao Zedong, who became the irreplaceable symbol of this authority, and increasingly, the only one. According to Franz Schurmann, after the victory of the Communist Revolution in 1949, the gentry or landlord class was completely destroyed on the basis of the collapse of Confucian values, and the new marriage law symbolized the liberation of women and the total collapse of paternalism (Schurmann, 1971: 7). At this point, the old social system completely collapsed, and the CPC rebuilt the new China according to its own ideology and rational organization mode, and realized the state’s “political conquest of society” (Madsen, 1999: 42). After 1949, based on the appeal to legitimacy of the Communist Revolution and the hope of eternity for the revolutionary regime, the social status and historical significance of young people or revolutionary youth were highly affirmed. Obviously, as a generation of dynastic change, the young people, especially the young revolutionary cadres, were the representatives of the new social order, the leaders or actual dominators of China’s vast grassroots society, and of course, the successors of the future cause. Therefore, Mao Zedong did not forget to continue to reaffirm the political mission and historical role of youth on all possible occasions: The world is yours and ours. But in the end it’s yours. You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in full bloom, like the sun at eight or nine o’clock in the morning. . . . The world belongs to you and China’s future belongs to you. (Mao, 1965: 14–15) Although Mao Zedong bestowed warm praise on the role of youth or revolutionary youth, their dominant position had been lost and their independent

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growth space was squeezed. While before 1949, the Kuomintang government still practiced authoritarian state rule at home, due to the extensive influence of Western society, the existence of liberated areas holding the banner of democracy, a certain degree of rural autonomy implemented by the gentry class, and the development of modern education, media, and other public fields in the metropolis, and even the existence of concessions, there was still a certain social space for the independent growth of young people. After 1949, this already tight space became even narrower. The one-sided international policy towards the Soviet Union and the outbreak of the “war to resist U.S. aggression and aid Korea” completely blocked any possible influence from the West; the overthrow of the gentry class and the subsequent land reform and collectivization of agriculture, as well as the simultaneous socialist transformation of industry and commerce, strengthened the state’s control over urban and rural society; the “department readjustment” plan implemented from 1952 to 1953 reconstructed China’s university education system in accordance with the Soviet model—private schools, especially missionary schools, were abolished, and departments related to ideology, including political science, sociology, law, journalism, and communication, were largely eliminated, on the one hand, and the ideological reform movement of university teachers was carried out in an allround way, thus “the school, once a haven for anti-system radical youth has been transformed into the breeding institution of ‘revolutionary youth’”, on the other hand (Chen Yingfang, 2007: 186). While the state and the Party achieved overall control or conquest of the society—the total control of the media, the disappearance of social groups that were relatively free from the state, the establishment of the household registration and personnel file system, the regularization of ideological transformation, the establishment of the occupational distribution system, and the implementation of the complete political socialization ceremony—the youth, or the “revolutionary youth”, completely lost their independence and became the assistant or subsidiary of the state, especially the Party. At this time, the word “revolutionary” in revolutionary youth had completely lost its original meaning of “resistant” and become a synonym for obeying the new order, namely revolutionary order, and following the rules in daily life. In this context, the “spirit of screws” represented by Lei Feng, a model of revolutionary youth highly respected by the state—that is, the individual is just a screw in the big machine of the state and the collective—naturally became the basic role-positioning of revolutionary youth. The transformation from revolutionary youth to rebel youth in 1966 took place without any changes in state and social relations. However, when the country was divided into two parts—two opposing social systems of the Party and the government (Zhou, 2000b), and the latter system led by Liu Shaoqi was regarded as a symbol of capitalism—by its founder Mao Zedong, the rebellious youth who appeared at this time could either continue to worship authorities feverishly, or turn their heads to crazily fight against the authorities that contradicted this, so that they generally had the typical dual personality of “authority personality” according to Chen Peihua (Chen Yingfang, 2007: 15–16). It is true that most of

152 Conclusion the young rebels “were born in the new society and grew up under the red flag” and they should have followed the path of their predecessors, the revolutionary youth, and grown into dedicated and authoritative builders of socialism like Lei Feng. However, in the process of political socialization of young people after 1949, the so-called “revolutionary heroism” education composed of radicalization and resistance still lurked in the daily cultivation of Lei Feng’s traits of loyalty and obedience. In daily life, this kind of education on radicalization and resistance was included in the following aspects. First, although in the new social order, “chairman Mao can only be worshiped, not imitated”, the rebellious image of young Mao Zedong was still deeply rooted in the hearts of the younger generation and had a large number of fanatical followers for a long time. Second, the legitimacy of “violent” revolutions had been lauded for its appeal to the legitimacy of communist revolutions, which was especially true for those children of the “five red categories” of people (i.e., revolutionary soldiers, revolutionary cadres, workers, poor and middle peasants after 1949), or today’s so-called “red second generation” (the earliest Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution). Finally, after 1949, Mao Zedong emphasized class struggle and never yielded in the fight against “imperialism, revision and counterrevolution” (Chen Peihua, 2007: 82–93; Chen Yingfang, 2007: 201–202). It can be seen that under the long-term immersion of such education, when the Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Zedong himself provided the stage for rebellion, out of loyalty to the great leader and worship of violent revolution, the revolutionary youth would naturally turn into rebel youth overnight. To be frank, as we have mentioned in the discussion of the youth revolt in the Cultural Revolution and the subsequent “going to mountains and countryside” movement in Chapter 2 of this book, although the movements in the late Mao Zedong era caused irreparable damage to the growth of China’s youth, as 17 million intellectual youth were suddenly left at the bottom of society, where social control was relatively weak and even the rural society alienated them, in addition to the strong homesickness composed of depression and disappointment, independent thinking also began to sprout within the educated youth group. The relatively independent and relaxed environment created by the lack of control, coupled with the realization of the absurdity of coming to the countryside from thousands of miles away and receiving “re-education” from the poor and middle peasants after close contact with them, made it possible for them to reflect on the “going to the countryside” movement and even on the class struggle and Cultural Revolution advocated by the Great Leader.7 Therefore, since 1968, the boom of underground literature, educated youth literature, and various “gray-cover books” and “yellow-cover books” published to criticize revisionism before the Cultural Revolution became popular among urban youth, especially among the educated youth who went to the countryside.8 These underground reading and reflection activities later not only “eventually developed into open forms of political expression” (Bonnin, 2004: 343; Leese, 2011: 243)—the April Fifth Movement in Tiananmen Square in 1976 and the largescale “returning to the city” movement of educated youth after 1978 (Liu, 2009:

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451–498)—but also laid a foundation for the development of the “ideological liberation movement” centering on the discussion of truth standards and the large-scale reform and opening-up afterwards. If we continue to talk about secular youth from the worship of authority, the so-called generation born in the 1970s to the 1990s who grew up with the reform and opening-up, perhaps the most typical change was the rapid secularization of the objects of worship in their vision—from political authority to consumer authority or the idol of the masses. Two of the most striking features of this shift are first the political figures of the revolutionary era were replaced by singers, movie stars, or sports stars. In Chapter 4 of the first volume of this book we have stated that these new secular icons showed a bright populist trend and were no longer charismatic politicians. Second, even those statesmen worshipped by the younger generation no longer had a divine aura. From the “Hello, Xiaoping” banner on the National Day parade of the 35th anniversary in 1984, to network users “Shijin Babaofan” (literally meaning “the mixed rice pudding”, practically, “the fans of Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao”) and “Xuexi Fensi Tuan” (literally meaning “the fans who learn from their idols”, practically, “the fans who learn from Chinese President Xi Jinping”), the young people, who used to look up to the political leaders as divine, now placed them at their own level. As we have mentioned before, the best of the rebel youth, those who poured into the universities in 1978 under the tide of reform and opening-up, have been socially active in Chinese society for over 30 years after graduation, and history excessively repays the deprivation of this generation to this small elite. In my view, their success is partly due to their “interrupted life course and hard rural life experience, which may lead them to abandon some illusions and inspire a pragmatic orientation more suitable for the market economy” (Zhou & Hou, 1999), but at the same time, it is more likely that the secular youth behind them, the so-called post-1970s, post-1980s, and even post-1990s have completely left the planned economy, the original system, and even the lifestyle of their predecessors, which leaves the 77graders and 78-graders, who are at best half-educated, with no challengers or rivals on their accustomed paths. In other words, the younger generation has a different way of life, making them and their predecessors two-track cars that would never meet each other, leading to long periods of brilliance for the 77-graders and 78-graders. Although China’s civil society has not yet formed, let alone formed a challenge to the country, it is acknowledged that the state’s control over society has been gradually weakened over the past four decades; social mobility has been greatly strengthened in space, occupation, and status; and cultural diversity and heterogeneity have also been significantly enhanced. All these have created conditions for the free and spontaneous growth of secular youth. From 1978 to 2020, outside the country, there have been three spaces for the growth of secular youth: the market, society, and the Internet.

154 Conclusion The market was gradually formed in the reform and opening-up after 1978. Before that, the state eliminated the status and role of the market through the planned economy, which also made young people rely on the state for their livelihood. Take occupational acquisition as an example. In Western countries, occupational segmentation mainly relies on diplomas, training, and a market access system (Weeden, 2002), while in the Mao Zedong era, it was mainly achieved through the identity and household registration system. As we have mentioned before, the household registration and personnel file system, together with the identity system, eliminated the possibility of young people seeking jobs by themselves, and naturally achieved effective control over them to a considerable extent. After over 40 years of reform, although the occupation acquisition system formed in the planned economy era still exists in government agencies, public institutions, and public enterprises, the impact of the urban– rural split household registration system on occupational acquisition continues, differences in wages and social security of laborers with different status are sometimes obvious (Bian & Zhang, 2001), a relatively free labor market has been formed and perfected. Not only did 260 million rural workers find their jobs in cities and industrial and commercial enterprises through the market, but also the improvement of the rate of return on education (Li & Ding, 2003), which we mentioned in Chapter 1 of the first volume of this book, made the relationship between human capital and labor price more market-oriented. All these make the dependence of secular youth, starting from the post-1970s, especially the post-1980s and post-1990s, on the state for career acquisition and even breadwinning to have been significantly reduced. According to the statistics of “Comprehensive survey data of China’s social conditions” in 2006 and 2008, Li Chunling et al. confirmed that not only did the proportion of agricultural employment of the post-1980s group drop sharply, but also their proportion of employment in non-public institutions was much higher than that of other generations (Li, 2013: 102–103, 346–348).9 It can be said that the existence of a relatively free market not only provides secular youth with the possibility to seek life outside the state system, but also provides them with the possibility to freely express their personal opinions, actively participate in public affairs, and even to be maverick and deviant in their personal life. Although the excessive promotion of the market economy and the promotion of the related principle of priority of growth are generally believed to affect the healthy development of society, so that China, as a socialist country, has formed a market economy which Polanyi called “disembedded” in society (Polanyi, 2001), the expansion of the scale of freedom corresponding to the nature of the market expands the space for the growth of society and the growth of the young generation. In the 1990s, especially after 2000, based on the partial transfer of the state to society, citizens or social organizations were encouraged to manage their own affairs in an autonomous way, “enhancing the vitality of social development” (Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, 2013: 69–70), and the originally cramped social space expanded to a certain extent. For secular youth, the social space they live in mainly consists of the

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following. On the one hand, with the implementation of the college enrollment expansion policy in 1999, higher education has expanded rapidly in the past 20 years, with the gross enrollment rate approaching 50% and the number of college students reaching 30 million. As the largest group of college students in the world, Chinese college students have become a social group with a certain degree of freedom, which also provides social soil for the breeding of various new ideas and behaviors. On the other hand, after the 1990s, a variety of voluntary civil organizations, especially grassroots organizations, began to emerge, including various officially registered civic organizations (NGOs or NPOs), informal grassroots organizations, student societies, consumer and entertainment clubs (including the fraternity), reading parties, business associations, and other mutual aid groups. Although both the registration and the activities of them are strictly controlled by the state, the emergence of these main “organizations aiming at social service and social change” (Yang, 2013: 138) provides the possibility for independent activities of the younger generation, especially for influencing the direction of national policies. For example, the post-1980s generation basically presented themselves as volunteers at the disaster relief site of the Wenchuan earthquake and during the Olympic Games in Beijing, showing their ability of self-organization and self-participation for the first time. In fact, in addition to the market and society, the rise of the Internet society after the 1990s also provided free space for the growth of Chinese youth. Although in the relevant sections of Chapters 2 and 3, we have discussed the influence of the emergence of the Internet in China as a social force on the formation of the public sphere, here we are willing to discuss it as a relatively independent factor affecting the growth of young people. The significance of the network to the expansion of social space lies in that, on the one hand, this online mode itself is a public space where citizens can participate, form public topics and public opinion forces, and influence national policies and actions (Hu, 2008: 312). On the other hand, not only do many public societies and NGOs depend on networks, but in fact their ability to use the network directly affects the nature and vitality of these communities or organizations, because the horizontal communication and information sharing of public goods through the network are just two important characteristics that civil society organizations must have. In addition, it must be pointed out that the discussion on the use of the Internet and its significance should not be limited to young intellectuals. Today’s large number of migrant workers who enter the city directly from the countryside are actually the generation using electronic technology. “The Internet, mobile phones and QQ grew up with them. At least among the migrant workers in the eastern coastal areas, an active electronic culture of the working class has been formed” (Yang, 2013: 239). If we say that there has always been a great difference between young intellectuals and ordinary people in modern China, today, thanks to the emergence of the Internet, for the first time, they share similarities in the use of media. It can be assumed that this will further affect their similarity in values, life attitudes, and social behaviors, and make cultural reverse a new way for the whole society to reforge intergenerational relations.

156 Conclusion

Cultural reverse: forging new intergenerational relations The reason why we spend considerable space describing the growth path of Chinese youth in the past century is to explain that, as a relatively free social force, the growth of young people has always been under the control of society, especially the state. Comparatively speaking, in the two periods before 1949 and after 1978, especially after 1992, young people obtained a larger space for growth and their independence became stronger. Before 1949, in the confrontation with the Manchu dynasty and Kuomintang rule, youth, including radical youth, the backbone of them, not only grew up, but actually rewrote the history of China with their radicalism and tenacity. After 1978, China’s reform and opening-up, especially the efforts towards marketization after 1992, provided the possibility for secular youth to get rid of the overall attachment to the state, especially state power. The expansion of various social space also provided a broader stage for the participation of the younger generation. When Chen Yingfang analyzed the division of May Fourth youth after the 1920s, she proposed the role or significance of intergenerational opposition in the subsequent political opposition between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. Although Chen Yingfang carefully stated that this “is not to prove that the opposition between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang is only an inter-generational opposition” (Chen Yingfang, 2007: 92), relevant data can still prove that intergenerational opposition does constitute some element of political or general social opposition. In the 1920s, most of the powerful faction of the Kuomintang were born in the 1860–1880s, and they had little direct contact with the May Fourth Movement and the new culture movement. On the contrary, except Chen Duxiu, most of the founders and early leaders of the CPC, including Mao Zedong, Li Dazhao, and Zhang Guotao, were born after the 1880s. They basically belonged to the new youth or May Fourth youth generation. This may indicate that significant historical phenomena such as wars and revolutions can probably create a generation, and may in turn become tools for understanding historical rhythms in accordance with the intergenerational turnover (Atiyah, 1993: 144–145). Further, if one considers that in normal intergenerational transitions, the older generation often controls the power of the state, then the relationship between the growing younger generation and the state may also project intergenerational relationships among different generations of society. In this way, perhaps the state’s shaping of youth and youth’s compliance or resistance to the existing order are just a more realistic magnification of intergenerational relations within families at the macro-level. As we have argued in Chapter 1 of the first volume of this book, generation and intergenerational relations are not only biological facts or natural continuations of biological facts, but also social facts. On the one hand, generation itself is the basis for the existence of society, a community of people, while the intergenerational relationship is a conventional social relationship. On the other hand, the problem of generation or intergenerational relationship is caused by the fracture or discontinuity between generations arising from the transition

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from traditional society to modern society in modern times. In other words, it is the rapid social changes in modern times that make biological generation turn into a real social generation. Considering that intergenerational relationship, as a social fact, is constructed by members of social groups, especially the elders, according to the values or life meaning of their times, its fragmentation or discontinuity is almost reflected as the fracture or change of the previous construction mode. From this point of view, the construction of intergenerational relations in traditional society is continuous and smooth. Take China as an example. The core of the intergenerational relationship in feudal society—filial piety and seniority—became a sacred tradition through inheritance of rites and customs. Rites and customs involved all aspects of the daily life of villagers, which were not only collective habits and local rules, but also the product of the collective memory of the elders. According to Halbwachs’s point of view, in the process of rites and customs inheritance, “collective frameworks are, to the contrary, precisely the instruments used by the collective memory to reconstruct an image of the past which is in accord, in each epoch, with the predominant thoughts of the society” (Halbwachs, 1992: 40). It is the social responsibility of the older generation to establish a historical identity of one’s family, nation, or group through the intention to reconstruct the past for the younger generation through their own memory, or to establish a contemporary connection with the past or even the ancient one. Although as a social construct, it is not difficult to falsify or distort collective or social memories since they can be reconstructed, in traditional society where today and even tomorrow is nothing but the natural continuation of yesterday, because current events are not definitely different from previous events, and current values are not different from previous values, in most cases, this pseudo-construction or distortion is only the result of individuals’ attachment or ostentatious motivation (e.g., as Halbwachs says, falsifying one’s aristocratic identity by compiling a family tree; Halbwachs, 1992: 225), and it will not become the common behavior of the whole group or society, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The rapid social changes that have taken place since modern times have produced many unprecedented things and changed or even overturned the values of the younger generation in judging the meaning of life. As a result, the reconstruction of collective memory has become an increasingly challenging form of social engineering. The greatest difficulty in social memory is how to reconcile the reconstruction or narrative of the past with the values or beliefs of today. From the perspective of the changes of Chinese society over the past hundred years, in the four generations in the long period we discussed, the reconstruction and inheritance of collective memory between generations basically did not have too much of a barrier between the following three generations, which effectively molded the intergenerational relationship between them. One is between radical youth and revolutionary youth. Although the latter inherited two elements of memory from the former’s narrative—“sacrifice” (devotion) and “anti-authority”—after the 1930s, Mao Zedong transformed anti-authority

158 Conclusion into loyalty to the Party, the state, and the leader himself by the need to save the nation, thus successfully realizing the continuation of the collective memory. The other is between revolutionary youth and rebel youth. Although the latter responded to the Great Leader’s call in the Cultural Revolution and directed the struggle against the former, as successors in their growth process, they directly received the revolutionary education or historical narrative from the former—including the worship of violent revolution and their unconditional obedience to the Party and leaders. In other words, although they beat their predecessors in the Cultural Revolution, they still accepted the collective memory of their narrative. The crisis of the construction and inheritance of intergenerational collective memory mainly occurred during the two great changes in Chinese society in modern times. The first crisis occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries between feudal scholar-officials and radical youth. At this time, no matter how hard Li Hongzhang and his kind tried to instill into the younger generation the “confidence in system”—“both China’s civil and military systems are much superior to those of the westerners”, numerous failures and dilemmas forced the young people with lofty ideals to seek otherwise for solutions, resolutely waging war against the Qing dynasty and Confucian ethics. The second crisis came in 1978 with the opening-up and especially after 1992 when secular youth came of age. At this time, the change of social environment, especially the change towards the market economy, changed the mainstream of values, and the parents and grandparents of the generation born in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—the middleaged rebel youth and the aging revolutionary youth of the past—found themselves in danger of being wiped out almost overnight. They were not only at a loss over the new era composed of consumption and the Internet, but more importantly, they found that the social changes had ruined the inheritance value of the revolutionary or insurgent culture they represent, and also reversed the intergenerational relationship between them and their offspring. Take “youth without regret” as an example. This is a common historical narrative of the rebel youth in recent years, that is, the educated youth generation who went to the countryside and went to the mountains in the Mao Zedong era. At this time, most educated young people began to retire from work or from the social stage after experiencing a series of hardships in life, such as going to the countryside, returning to the city, seeking jobs, being laid off and making a living again, and the small number of “elites” of 77-graders and 78-graders who later became “worker-, peasant- and soldier-students” or caught the last opportunity to get into college in Deng Xiaoping’s reform also began to reach the peak of their life— becoming the backbone of society or even the leaders of the Party and the country. In almost all historical narratives of educated youth, the “bitterness” of going to the countryside is the common feeling of people and also the “main melody” of their narration. However, there is a sharp internal contradiction between such narration and the life summary of “no regret” (Liu, 2003). Obviously, a painful history has created a wasted youth, but its participants have all said “youth without regret”

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after more than 30 years. You can feel that social forces play an important role in the construction of individual memories. In the analysis of “youth without regret” of the educated generation, Liu Yaqiu sets two levels of “individual memory” and “collective memory”. On the first level, “no regret” is attributed to the experience of “suffering” as a wealth of life, or the sharpening of personal character; on the second level, “no regret” is attributed to “suffering with the republic”; in other words, through the collective transformation of the suffering of individuals, it explains the theme of no regret because they have suffered for the republic (Liu, 2003). Although we acknowledge that the collective memory of each generation is mainly influenced by their life experiences when they were relatively young (Coser, 2002: 52), and the collective memory of each generation is largely about knowing oneself or self-identity, if we put this “no regret” narrative into the context of intergenerational relations, we will immediately find that the narrative object of educated youth or rebel youth is their offspring, that is, the secular youth born in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. If we regard the collective memory of “youth without regret” as an intergenerational expression or exchange, even if there is some distortion in this collective feeling, its original intention is just that: On the one hand, they establish their own meaning in the eyes of the next generation—we are “not the ‘suffering’ weak, but the strong fighting against adversity, the backbone of the society” (Wang & Liu, 2006); on the other hand, they want to tell the next generation that it is precisely because “we have endured the sufferings of the republic that you have had the good times of reform and opening-up”.10 We have experienced about half a century of history ourselves. At the dawn of the new century, history has sent us into today’s turbulent, multipolar world. A world with diversified beliefs and values; a fast-moving, restless, competitive world. As we look back, we marvel at the sacrifices this generation has made, the hardships it has endured, the contributions it has made, and the spirit of constant struggle. . . . No matter in which kind of ordinary post, facing the reality, struggle, and search is always the theme song of this generation. I think, in the face of the motherland, in the face of the future, in the face of parents, lovers and children, we are fully qualified to say: we have tried our best. (Qu, 2002: 123) This oral account by educated youth entitled “Struggle and search is always the theme song of this generation” tries to affirm the meaning of life and the value of struggle, but also more or less shows some hidden helplessness. If this helplessness in the face of parents is a kind of guilt of “having failed to stick to family possessions”, then in the face of children or of the future, it is filled with a sense of inadequacy. From our discussion, we can see that whether from the twin sense of “guarding the home and protecting the possessions” or “expanding the territory”, rebel youth or educated youth generally are not successful in

160 Conclusion life. They have inherited the past from the revolutionary youth, but may lose the future in the face of rapid social changes. Of course, the loss of dominance by the older generation over the younger generation is not the whole story on the Chinese intergenerational stage; the other part of the story is composed of intergenerational dialogue and symbiosis; that is, through cultural reverse discussed in this book, intergenerational relations in contemporary Chinese society are achieving a dynamic new turn. Twenty years ago, when I returned to the research on this topic, I wrote clearly and definitely: “cultural reverse” is the product of a changing society, which indicates that the one-way cultural inheritance mode of traditional society is changing to the two-way or even multi-directional cultural inheritance mode of modern society. In fact, the emergence of this cultural inheritance model not only provides the possibility for the older generation to conform to social life and keep up with historical trends, but also increases the younger generation’s sense of historical responsibility. The symbiotic complementarity between general socialization and reverse socialization or “cultural reverse” indicates that the cultural continuity on which the development of society depends has never been so evident as today in the rise and fall of the older generation and the younger generation. (Zhou, 2000a) Because the parent–child relationship or intergenerational boundaries within the family are very clear—in this community of people, the father is the father and the son is the son—it is easier to compare values and lifestyles between generations. Compared with rural areas in China, cities, especially coastal cities, have undergone more significant social transformation in the past four decades after the reform and opening-up, and correspondingly, there has been more significant cultural reverse between generations of urban families. At the beginning, we explained that the research objects described in this book are mainly limited to the parent–child or intergenerational relationship within families, and the families interviewed, except in Chongqing, are also mainly limited to coastal cities. However, it must be pointed out that this does not mean that cultural reverse is only a reverse inheritance phenomenon within the family, nor that it is only found in the most developed coastal cities or metropolises in China. In fact, after the reform and opening-up, when China opened its door after years of imprisonment, especially after the rapid transformation of society and the growth of the younger generation promoted by globalization and the Internet, as a new way of cultural inheritance, cultural reverse is changing and remaking the intergenerational relationships throughout the whole of China. While it encourages the older generation to lose absolute control and educational power over the younger generation, it also helps it to better adapt to an increasingly modern society through dialogue and communication. As a result, society has become increasingly youthful and vibrant.

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Cultural regurgitation not only occurs within families, but also is the most common cultural phenomenon among generations in China. It occurs in all aspects of social life: from values to life attitudes to behaviors, from elites to the middle class to the grassroots. Almost every stratum, every group in every stratum, every person in every group, as long as you are old you will feel the influence or reverse from the younger generation. Whether you accept it or not, however much, you will feel that by not accepting it, not only will you struggle to navigate a China you are no longer familiar with, but you will, in fact, lose one last bit of your ability (not power, I’m afraid) to “educate” the younger generation. In this age of dialogue and symbiosis, the ability to educate others is closely related to tolerance and acceptance of others. Therefore, in this era, those few “tide surfing” elders who are still able to do well on the social stage are all experts who are willing and good at learning from the younger generation, and thus finally retain an influence on or educational ability for the younger generation. In modern life, general social relations that have the most distinctive intergenerational characteristics occur in the mentorship system in the factory and in the relationship between graduate students and mentors in universities. Although after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, when the East China Normal University opened the “First Education Seminar” with the help of Soviet experts in 1955, it adopted their training mode of teaching and collective guidance (Yi, 2012); generally speaking, no matter whether before or after 1949, especially after 1978, the one-to-one tutorial system has been the regular training mode of graduate education in Chinese universities and research institutions. Because of the extraordinary development of graduate education,11 especially doctoral education, the binding and interweaving of the interests of teachers and students and their frequent daily interaction, combined with the traditional Chinese saying “Once a teacher, always a father”, not only is the relationship between a mentor and a disciple (student) now very common and close, but the teacher–student relationship in Chinese society has also become a kind of pseudo-blood relationship very similar to parent–child relationship. After the resumption of China’s postgraduate education in 1978, a large number of intellectuals, who had previously worked in the cowshed or in the May Seventh cadre schools toward “reform through labor”, returned to institutions of higher learning to teach in laboratories and classrooms, and enrolled graduate students. However, years of class struggle and political movement had hollowed out their brains and made them feel deeply unfamiliar toward the academic world, especially the Western academic world. Even Professor Fei Xiaotong, who studied in Britain as a young man and was well-educated, once lamented that because of his long isolation from Western academia, “I can’t keep up with their changes in the past thirty years” (Fei, 1985: 279). Compared to these academic titans, more professors who graduated after 1949, the so-called professors “trained by new China”, were unable to cope with the influx of students after 1978, especially those with rich social

162 Conclusion experience and a strong thirst for knowledge. Although the boundaries between teachers and students were clear and the rules could not be crossed, the question of who instructs whom remained an unspoken topic in universities for quite a long time. In the early years, professors lived in poverty and funding for research was tight, which led to mentors developing unambiguous aspirations for fame and wealth and the possibility of tension between teachers and students.12 Decades later, when the first generation of graduate students after the reform and openingup became mentors themselves, thanks to 42 years of reform and opening-up and the country’s progress, their education, vision, ability, and even economic status are generally better than their teachers, but the progress of science and technology in these decades, especially with the emergence of the network society, still requires them to face the challenges of the younger generation. Without the help of the younger generation, that is, their own graduate students, many mentors have difficulties in project application, data search, data collection, experiment design, model construction, and paper writing, especially in English. It has also made the question of whether and how mentors should sign papers completed by their students (such as whether they should be the first author) a common subject of debate at colleges and universities, which has ensued even for prominent and respected scholars. Professor Jin Shenghua, from the school of psychology of Beijing Normal University, is a 77-grade college student who entered the university after the reform and opening-up. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, he successively studied for his master’s degree and doctor’s degree in psychology. Recalling his graduate days, Jin Shenghua affirmed that at least when he was studying for a master’s degree, he was not influenced by the teacher in his studies. On the contrary, he influenced the teacher in many aspects: When we were students, although the teacher was still a teacher, generally speaking, because the social psychology had just recovered, the teacher didn’t know much, but my English was better, so I helped the teacher a lot. For example, I helped my teacher frame some of his books. (Interview with Jin Shenghua, 2005) Compared with those PhDs and masters under his guidance today, on the one hand, Jin Shenghua affirms that he has good theoretical and statistical skills, and his interests range from social psychology to education to human resources, so it is impossible for students to immediately replace him even if they are only one or two years younger than him; on the other hand, he admits that students have helped him a lot, at least in some ways: This kind of help is mainly in two aspects: One is in the use of the network. For example, we were going to build a human resources website, which contained a lot of technical work, including the use of software and so on. I tried to do a few things at first, only to find that I couldn’t compete with my two students, because they originally majored in information engineering, so I kind of gave it up. Now such work is simply handed over

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to my graduate students. The other is in researching specific topics. Some of the topics were new to me, so what I had was a clear theoretical framework and knowledge system, but the details were not clear. So I would give it to three to four doctors or masters, who were responsible for collecting information and making presentations, and I would use their data to modify the original research framework. As a result, my research framework was enriched, their desire for self-expression was satisfied, and both of us improved our knowledge. (Interview with Jin Shenghua, 2005) Just as cultural reverse has affected the intergenerational relationships of China’s urban families and society as a whole, this revolutionary approach to cultural transmission has also affected the broader population and families of rural areas over the past few decades. We know that the victory of the Chinese revolution depended on the participation of millions of peasants. However, after 1949, a series of rapid and violent campaigns were carried out in the rural areas—from land reform, unified purchase and marketing of grain, cooperation, and people’s communes, to the socialist education movement of “four purifications” in the fields of politics, ideology, organization and economy and “emulating Dazhai on agriculture”, which did not change the poverty and backwardness of the rural areas, but plunged Chinese agriculture into a deeper process of involution—that is, “with extreme labor intensification . . . It inevitably leads to diminishing marginal returns”. Not only was society in the process of “growth without development” for several decades (Huang, 2000: 241), but also around 1960 there was a large-scale famine and the tragic death of tens of millions of people. After 1978, reforms began first in the countryside. The system of contract responsibility linked to production and the establishment of township enterprises began to change the poverty in rural China. After 1980, farmers began to get rid of the shackles of the land and went to towns or cities, either for business, work, or to engage in other non-agricultural occupations. After 2000, this wave swept inland from coastal developed areas, spread from males to females, and expanded from individuals to family groups and whole villages. By the time of the Sixth Census in 2010, the total floating population in rural areas had reached 260 million, among which the new generation of the post-1980s accounted for more than half (Ma, 2011). Despite the fact that large numbers of migrant workers brought China’s urban and rural development some problems, such as land abandonment, rising crime rates, and governance crises (He Xuefeng, 2013: 162), the hollowing out and economic decline of China’s rural areas (Li, 2004: 1), the increase in the number of left-behind children, the decline of family stability, and the dislocation of values and consumption concepts among young farmers (He et al., 2010: 243), this “third great creation of Chinese farmers” (Huang, 1996: 65), which was completely comparable to the contract responsibility linked to production and the establishment of township enterprises, brought more positive influences to Chinese society. It not only drove China’s economic development and urbanization process, promoted the population flow and market circulation between urban and rural areas, and enabled farmers to acquire the modern growth

164 Conclusion of values and social psychology through flow and urban experience (Zhou, 1998b), but it also impacted the urban–rural dual partition system with strong barriers formed after the 1950s (Solinger, 1999). If we return to the topic we have discussed, the influence of young farmers, who acquired varying degrees of modernity through mobility and urban experience, on their parents, their fellow villagers, and their hometown was also immeasurable. When Deng Xiaoping retired from politics, a large number of young people who had worked on the coast for years returned home, bringing not only goods, but ideas and lifestyles that enabled them to run their own businesses and set new standards for inland areas. This process accelerated the spread of the national urban culture (Vogel, 2012: 652). In Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, which was first published in 2012 with 500,000 copies, Ezra Feivel Vogel, a lifelong studious and wise Harvard professor, saw the multifaceted cultural back-feeding effects of young migrant workers on their homes and fellow citizens. Thus, in the eyes of this American sociologist who is a China expert, the mobility of farmers has not only the simple economic significance of getting rich and getting rid of poverty, but also the revolutionary role of driving cultural and social changes. In fact, just as the sudden opening-up and reform in 1978 created a precipitous gap between the decades that followed and the decades that preceded it, so the rigid urban–rural divide that emerged after 1949 also created a huge regional gap. If it is the former that gave the younger generation the ability to “feed back” to their parents, then of course the latter also enabled those young migrant workers who were the first to step into the developed coastal areas, step into the urban life, and thus lead the trend to feed back to their hometown and their people. Back in the mid-1990s, more than a decade before Vogel published Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, along the lines discussed above, Rachel Murphy, a PhD student at Cambridge University, was studying the broader impact of returning migrant workers on rural China and its farmers, in Wanzai, Xinfeng, and Yudu counties in Jiangxi, the big labor-exporting province in central China. In her doctoral dissertation titled “How migrant labor is changing rural China”, the impact of returning farmers on the local economy, society, and culture was reflected in many aspects. For example, returnees bring back civility, hygiene, law, and modern culture to the countryside. They use their savings and skills to find non-agricultural employment opportunities in the local areas. Another example is that some of the remittances workers send back to their hometown will be used for production purposes, thus improving the family’s ability to obtain income from the land and facilitating their participation in urban and rural social and economic life. Also, although working for money may inhibit some people’s motivation to study, it also encourages other parents to invest in their children’s education because of its contribution to the family economy. Finally, returning migrant workers bring about changes in management practices for rural enterprises, and even influence the government to change the traditional management mode formed under the planned economy system (Murphy, 2009: 48–72, 81, 95, 179). Considering that compared to the older people who stayed

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at home, whether it is the first generation of migrant workers or the second generation of post-1980s migrant workers, they are generally young people when they seek their dreams in the city. Therefore, we can fully regard the impact of migrant workers on their hometown and fellow villagers as a kind of intergenerational influence similar to the cultural reverse we discuss here. It is conceivable that the concrete practice of this influence in rural China must be mixed with the excitement of the pioneers and the loss of the laggards, but in the end it must also lead to the joint progress of two or more generations.

The greening of China, or the rebirth of an ancient people So far, we have spent more than 160,000 words discussing the dramatic differences between two or several generations caused by the huge fission in Chinese society since the reform and opening-up, as well as the subversion or revolutionary change of the traditional cultural inheritance mode caused by it. We are not making a mountain out of a molehill, spending too much intelligence and energy, too many days and nights, in this small area we call “cultural reverse.” While the conclusions are far from shocking, it is undoubtedly worth spending the most creative 25 years of our life trying to figure out the patterns and details of it. So the question is: Are our personalities too sensitive to social change? Or is it because of the discipline in which we have been immersed that we have, consciously or unconsciously, sharpened the so-called “sociological imagination” that keeps us active in the discipline we explore? Or is it true that our society today is undergoing unprecedented changes that are affecting or reshaping not only the intergenerational relationships of Chinese society, but also, most likely, a different future for our ancient country? Before the reform and opening-up in 1978, although Mao Zedong was obsessed with whether the revolutionary cause could last forever, the intergenerational problem was not a serious concern of the whole society, for the younger generation or youth was only the “alternative” of the adult society, a product that the elders were trying to forge—its eligibility was determined by the judgment of the elders. However, after 1978, the sharp social changes altered the intergenerational power pattern, and the older generation lost its power of discourse, leading to a shift from the one-way intergenerational dominating relationship to the multi-generational coexistence relationship. In reality, the intergenerational relationship ranges from intergenerational separation, intergenerational conflict, and intergenerational symbiosis, to intergenerational reverse, to, of course, the traditional intergenerational domination. The complexity of intergenerational relations has not only triggered the collective anxiety of the older generation about their future, but also prompted the younger generation to think about the living conditions of the present. Therefore, as the French sociologist Jean-Charles Lagree puts it, “there has been an explosion of works around the world that have been labeled ‘intergenerational’” (Lagree, 2007: 328). In China,

166 Conclusion where generation or intergenerational relationship was no longer an issue after 1949 at least, this concept has once again become an important word in people’s daily life and academic discussions. If we search the National Journal Full-text Database (CJFD) with “intergenerational” as the key word, we will find that the number of relevant papers showed a distinct upward trend during the 37 years from 1983 to 2020: from 3 in 1983, to 75 in 1993, to 1,153 in 2003, to 5,523 in 2013, finally to 9,240 in 2020 (CNKI, 2020). Not only that, but the subjects of concern have become increasingly diverse: the intergenerational elite transformation in cities, class reproduction, intergenerational income flow, the intergenerational transmission of poverty in rural China, generational differences in household consumption, intergenerational inheritance of family capital, the generation difference between collective action and the protection of workers’ rights in Pearl River Delta, generational differences and the net generation, intergenerational criticism of literature, only children and intergenerational relationship, cultural reverse between generations, as well as the generational change and its power. Almost all social science issues can be addressed from the perspective of generation or intergenerational relations, and the generational or intergenerational perspective has become a realistic research approach comparable to the once-popular class or class struggle perspective. In this sense, it is not that we are over-sensitive or over-imaginative, but rather that the complex and multi-dimensional social changes described in this book contribute to generational change and, in turn, to the modern direction of the ancient country of China. This trend, both subtle and silent and grand, reminds us of a scene in 1970. At the end of the American Youth Movement in 1968, around the time that Margaret Mead, the anthropologist described in our first chapter, wrote the seminal book Culture and Commitment: A Study on Generation Gap, in the small town of New Haven, a little more than an hour’s drive from New York, Charles A. Reich, a professor at Yale law school, produced another account of American Youth Culture, The Greening of America: How the Youth Revolution Re-valued America (1970). Like Margaret Mead, Reich not only praised youth culture, but also discussed it in a similar syllogistic historical pattern. For this reason, Reich used the concept of “consciousness” to describe the intergenerational inheritance of American society. He firmly believed that the concept of consciousness gives us diverse materials, by which we can discuss in a timely fashion what has happened in America and what is happening now (Reich, 1970: 24). According to Reich, there are three types of consciousness that dominate contemporary America: One was formed in the nineteenth century, the second in the first half of this century, the third is just emerging. Consciousness I is the traditional outlook of the American farmer, small businessman and worker who is trying to get ahead. Consciousness II represents the values of an organizational society. Consciousness III is the new generation. The three categories

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are, of course, highly impressionistic and arbitrary; they make no pretence to be scientific. And, since each type of consciousness is a construct, we would not expect any actual individual to exhibit in symmetrical perfection all the characteristics of one type of consciousness. (Reich, 1970: 22) Obviously, the first consciousness is the “American dream” that serves as the core of traditional American middle-class values and inspires generations of Americans. If the first consciousness encourages people to be self-made men, then the second consciousness, the values advocated by the American authorities, regards the United States as a country of organization and domination, and individuals must find their own way in the world created by others (Reich, 1970: 63). Furthermore, unlike the first two kinds of consciousness, Reich believes that the younger generation has formed a different kind of consciousness from their parents’—the third consciousness. The young people of the third consciousness have no difficulty in seeing the political falsehood and dishonesty, the ugliness and superficiality, of architecture and urban planning. Therefore, older generations should be re-educated so that they have the same insight (Reich, 1970: 283). Reich predicts that because of the third consciousness, there is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. (Reich, 1970: 11) This is a silent revolution in values, and with the emergence of the third consciousness dominating society, the United States will experience a common greening. We acknowledge that the United States and China, two of the great powers in the world today, have many differences, including history, culture, population, resources, patterns of economic operations, and entire political systems, but the theme we are talking about today—the transformation of intergenerational relations in Chinese society, or cultural reverse—is emerging in a context very similar to the crisis in American culture nearly half a century ago that Charles Reich and Margaret Mead discussed. To borrow Reich’s language, for Americans living in the 1960s and 1970s, “the great question of these times is how to live in and with a technological society” (Reich, 1970: 22). We have explained at length in this book that since the reform and opening-up in 1978, due to the rapid economic growth and great social changes, China has also begun to be a technological society constructed by the rapid development of electrical appliances, manufacturing technology, and the Internet. It is the development of technology, especially Internet technology in daily life, that has made the growth of GDP, the advent of consumerism, and globalization no longer of

168 Conclusion mere material significance to the 1.3 billion Chinese people, making it possible to change the way two generations behave and live, and making it possible for the younger generation to display values and social behaviors that are radically different from those of their parents, not to mention their grandparents, and thus ultimately rewrite the history of this deeply traditional nation. At the end of this book, we will discuss a specific example of cultural reverse that happened around me. In August 2014, Nanjing hosted the Second Youth Olympic Games on the basis of the Tenth National Games held in 2005. For Nanjing, the former capital before 1949, this was one of the few major political tasks it took on after becoming the “abandoned capital” in 1949, and a rare opportunity to show its face, or show the city’s charm. Although the Youth Olympic Games ended with many disappointments, such an international event was, on the face of it, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a second-tier Chinese city like Nanjing to raise its international profile.13 However, a story related to the topic discussed in this book took place during the preparation of the Youth Olympic Games, which will give you a real picture of intergenerational relations in Chinese society, and will convince you that only when the older generation can truly listen to the younger generation, accept their values, and the way they see society and the world can today’s China finally change its rigidity and decay; in other words, only in this way can the nation be as green as the withered seedlings that thrive on spring rains. NMB, the protagonist of this story, was a senior in Nanjing Foreign Language School in 2012. NMB was born in a family rich in business talent but with an unseverable affection for the campus. His father NMF and mother NMM were math classmates at Beijing Normal University before graduating in 1989 and were assigned to teach in their hometown middle school because of the far-reaching political turmoil. They both went to graduate school, and after their master's degrees, both of them made good starts in their business careers. Then they both gave up bright business prospects to pursue doctorates in university. After receiving a doctorate in management, NMF engaged in advertising research, which led to his involvement in the early planning of the Youth Olympic Games. It was this plan that pushed NMB, NMF’s son who was preparing to go abroad in his third year of high school, to the front of these Games: At that time, I had decided to study abroad, so I didn’t have to prepare for the college entrance examination, and had time to follow my father to the Youth Olympic Games “promotion slogan” review meeting. Two of my classmates and I went to the meeting and found that all the people present were members of the so-called Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games, except the three of us. There were a few foreigners among them, but most of them were Chinese, and all of them looked big and fat to us children. They put us in a corner and then rambled on, sometimes in English, sometimes in Chinese. Because the three of us were foreign language school students and our English

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was good, their speech sounded quite funny to us. So I raised my hand and said to the officials in English, “This won’t work. Now that it is a great event for young people, why don’t you get more young people? Why not let the young people decide the slogan?” “Didn’t we invite you here?” they answered. I said, “Just the three of us, sitting in the corner.” When I finished, the adults laughed, and I sensed some awkwardness in their laughter. It happened that I was wearing a T-shirt that read “Can anybody hear me?” I didn’t know if anyone noticed, but I think it just reflected my state of mind at that time. (NMB, 2013) To be fair, NMB’s questioning, though uncomfortable for the adults, made them think that there was some truth in it, and that NMB was clever and good at English, so they continued to seek him out for various activities in the following period of time. NMF teased that his son had become a “middleman” during that time—taking a group of classmates, many of them foreign, to participate in various Youth Olympic Games preparation activities. NMM participated in one such event, in which NMB took the class’s international team—Chinese students, as well as students from the United States, France and Chile—to talk to the Youth Olympic Games organizing committee. These children from all over the world had never been immersed in such officialdom culture as China’s, so they were frank with those officials of the Youth Olympic Games, never thinking that they were officials or leaders. At first, the Chilean boy refused to speak. He had never been happy since he came to China, because in his opinion, Chinese children lived every day like they were in prison—doing nothing but homework. But then he spoke up, and despite his anger at Chinese parents, he said that the children in Chile play soccer for four hours a day (even that sweet-natured French girl chimed in, saying they played soccer for at least two hours a day), and you are making Chinese children like this! I could tell that the Chilean boy was really angry, and he felt sorry for the “abuse” of his Chinese classmates by their parents. At that moment, I felt the Chinese members of the Youth Olympic Games organizing committee were a little touched, as they realized that children aged 13–19, the so-called teenager, were the main audience of the Youth Olympic Games, and their thoughts might be their real expectation of them. In other words, you can’t see the Youth Olympic Games as a sports meeting. For children, sport is something that permeates their lives, or sport is life; it’s not that we are bringing the kids together and having a sports meeting at that time. (NMM, 2013) Although the international team of the Foreign Language School led by NMB made many contributions to the youth Olympic Games—NMB was “working hard” for the international event in his city, and at one point he even wanted to enlist dozens of students from around the world who had studied at the

170 Conclusion university before returning home—the handsome boy in the end felt cheated by the adult world. It is not that the elders of the organizing committee did not want to listen to young people, or that they did not have any ideas at all, but their true purpose of involving children in the “youth show” was neither to listen nor to learn, but just to give the event in this semi-marginal city some international flavor. Apart form NMB, even his PhD parents were initially unaware of the hidden intentions behind the smiling faces. Even when NMB was asked by the accreditation committee to bring children from as many countries as possible, it was kindly interpreted by the children that the adults wanted to listen widely to opinions and suggestions. But when the organizing committee was about to launch a promotional slogan press conference, the real reason the “seniors” valued NMB and his team was finally made public. The organizing committee called NMB and asked him to get some students to come to the televised press conference, but the seniors repeatedly stated that they would mainly look for foreign students, preferably American and European students with blond hair and blue eyes, and promised to put his international team in the front row—as they say, “It looks good.” “It looks good” was the real motivation why the organizing committee of adults was so interested to deal with NMB, and it was this fatal motivation that hurt the innocent and emotional NMB and his kind. In other words, children led by NMB with a sense of participation in their dreams ended up as props for seniors to construct the “international style”, like their scripts, stage lighting, SONY MSW-930p or 5DMarkII, or whatever. China’s reality, or “national conditions”, educated NMB, who decided at the last minute to withdraw, and the planned international mobilization would not happen. Of course, NMB’s departure did not affect the Nanjing organizing committee’s enthusiasm for publicity—“Share the games, share our dreams”, the slogan of the Youth Olympic Games co-developed by NMB, still made their younger followers confident and ambitious. Do not assume that the loser in this intergenerational interaction or contest is NMB who finally quit, or that the elders or seniors who experienced this youth show were unscathed. No, the countless complaints we hear today about how the younger generation is apathetic, uninvolved, or simply rejecting the adult world (Chen Yingfang, 2007: 224–229; Li, 2013: 75) are actually the inevitable result of the older generation interacting with the younger generation in the same false way. Children or the younger generation are not reluctant to participate, but they are responding in a unique way to the hypocrisy and affectation of the older generation. What we adults fail to realize is that by “sharing” the youth of the younger generation in a false way today, we are depriving ourselves of our future altogether. But if you, like the countless others we have written about in this book, sincerely accept the advice, opinions, and criticisms of our children, in short, accept their cultural reverse, not only will you be able to fit into this new world and win the future, but our old country will be rejuvenated.

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We are not the first to think that young people or teenagers represent tomorrow or the future more than older people. As early as 1900, the year of the new century after the failure of the 1898 reform movement, when the whole country was in a state of low spirits with the intelligentsia, and the boxers of the Yihetuan were under the double spell of nationalism and invulnerability, Liang Qichao, a famous thinker at the end of the Qing dynasty, wrote his article “On young China” with great enthusiasm. The article uses “the old man” as a metaphor for the “great empire” of the Qing dynasty, which had entered a doomsday dusk, and “the young man” for the vigorous and eclectic “young China”: Old men think of the past, young men of the future. Nostalgia comes from thinking of the past, while hope from the future. Nostalgia leads to conservativeness, and hope to progress. Conservativeness keeps one old, and progress new. Those who are thinking of the past think they have experienced everything, so they do not bother to change; those who are thinking of the future think they have experienced little before, so they dare to break the rules. Old men are full of worries, and young men of joy. Worries make one frustrated, and joy makes one vigorous. Frustration leads to cowardice; and vigorousness to the heroic. Cowardice makes one drift along, but the heroic makes one adventurous. The former can destroy the world, while the latter helps build the world. (Liang, 1999, Vol. 2: 409) To make a new world, of course, we must first make a group of new people worthy of this job. After the 1911 revolution, both Yuan Shikai’s reign as emperor and Zhang Xun’s restoration deeply impressed Lu Xun, who had been extremely excited before, with the idea of “tyranny will last forever, and rejuvenation is hard” (Lu, 2005, Vol. 8: 42). Therefore, on the one hand, he called for “saving children” through the Diary of a Madman; on the other hand, he was determined to start from the children’s education to transform the national character, to solve the problem of “rearing people” in Chinese society. In Lu Xun’s opinion, there were many Chinese children who were “lively, healthy, tenacious, with their heads and faces held high” or “looked foreign” at the very beginning, but the “good children” favored by families and society were “low-browed, agreeable and submissive”. In view of his abhorrence of the national character of China and the social system that created it, Lu Xun firmly believed that: Among the so-called “foreign styles”, there are many advantages, which are also inherent in the nature of Chinese people. However, due to the repression of various dynasties, they have shrunk down. Now they are even given to foreigners without any reason. It must be brought back—be recovered. (Lu, 2005, Vol. 6: 83–84) If “what happens in childhood is what happens in the future” (Lu, 2005, Vol. 4: 581), then a weak childhood naturally will not have a vigorous youth, let alone a strong prime of life.

172 Conclusion In fact, what Lu Xun said, namely “what happens in childhood is what happens in the future”, does not only refer to the situation of individuals, but also the situation of a nation or a country. In other words, what kind of children we have now determines what kind of nation and country we will have in the future. In this sense, the old Chinese saying “You may predict one’s future when he is very young” can be interpreted to mean that the future of our nation or country is determined by the ambition, character, cultivation, and ability of today’s young people and even babbling children. We have repeatedly discussed in this book the life course theory of the American sociologist Glenn Elder, in his book Children of the Great Depression, which “on the shelves of social scientists such as Japan, China and Germany who are concerned about the consequences of rapid social change for individuals . . . there may be a place for it” (Elder, 2002: 422). Elder elaborates on the shaping of individual personality and the whole history of life by past historical times and the historical events in them. Instead of marveling at the power of the creator in the face of the oddities of individual lives, you might as well acknowledge that “changing times are shaping our lives” (Elder, 2002: 420). Furthermore, the “carving” or “shaping” of people by the times has different meanings in different life courses of a person. Even the same major historical event does not exert the same influence on all living individuals at the same time; it depends on one’s class status, educational background, career and learning ability, and, of course, as the theme of this book suggests, it equally or even more depends on the stage of one’s life—that is, how old one is at the time of this or these major historical events. Obviously, our memories of important political and social events are structured according to age, especially when we are young (Coser, 2002: 51). Therefore, “one’s basic values reflect the conditions that prevailed during one’s preadult years” (Inglehart, 1997: 33). Take the four generations of Chinese youth discussed in this chapter as an example. If the major historical event for the radical youth was the expulsion of the Manchus or the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, for the revolutionary youth was saving the nation from subjugation, and for the rebel youth was the great proletarian cultural revolution, then the most important historical event for contemporary secular youth is the economic growth and marketization against the background of globalization. Never underestimate the impact of economic growth and marketization on the evolution of Chinese people’s values and social behaviors. In the past 100 years, Weber, Ingles, and Inglehart all discussed the relationship between economic development or modernization and the evolution of people’s social psychology. For China’s younger generation, what we call the secular youth, or those born in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, the most important change in their personal growth history is that as China’s economy has grown, basic survival has become less of an issue for most Chinese. This change makes it possible for Chinese people, as Inglehart said, to shift from the value of subsistence to the value of self-expression of happiness, which leads to the emergence of the so-called value of post-materialism. Taking into account the reality of China, Inglehart also affirmed clearly:

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China has made remarkable economic and technological progress in the past 30 years . . . In the following decades, China will experience a process of intergenerational value transformation, in which younger groups tend to be more inclined to gender equality, tolerate foreign groups and attach more importance to freedom of speech than their elders. (Inglehart, 1997: 1) In fact, from the perspective of the issues we have discussed—the greening or rejuvenation of China or the Chinese nation, in addition to the transformation of the values of the younger generation—through cultural reverse they can also transfer their understanding of the new world to their elders, and facilitate the latter’s transformation to the new era. So, as Liang Qichao says: If the young people are intelligent, China will be intelligent; if the young people are wealthy, China will be wealthy; if the young people are strong, China will be strong; if the young people are independent, China will be independent; if the young people are free, China will be free; if the young people are progressive, China will be progressive; if the young people can get ahead of Europe, China will get ahead of Europe; if the young people are best in the world, China will be the best in the world. The morning sun is rising in the sky, bright and brilliant; the Yellow River is running to the sea, mighty and magnificent. A hidden dragon leaps out of a deep pool and fishes flee; a tiger cub roars in the hollow valley and beasts creep; a proud eagle springs off the vast land and dust reels. Exotic buds are bursting in the trees, pretty and vigorous; double-edged swords are sharpened on the stones, icy and glorious. Blue heaven over our heads, yellow earth below our feet, profound history in our hearts, and extended roads before our eyes, we look forward to our future as wide as ocean, great and grand. So majestic is our young China, forever with the universe; so robust are our Chinese youth, eternal with our motherland. (Liang, 1999, Vol. 2: 411) Finally I again quote “On young China” by Liang Qichao as the end of the book, because I, like countless ancient sages who wanted to realize the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, have deep expectations for a young China with eternal youth: We will grow old, but our motherland will remain young.

Notes 1 Until around World War II, the age of youth was mostly defined as 15–20 years old. In France’s postwar census, for example, youth was defined as between 14 and 18. Since then, the age range of young people has been pushed back again and again, from 15–25 years old to 20–30 years old and even 35 years old. As a criterion for

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comparison, the Constitution of the Communist Youth League of China stipulates that young people are aged from 14 to 28. The most important change is the latest youth standard established by UNESCO in 2013. Anyone under the age of 44 can be called “youth”, which reflects the two changes caused by the development of education, especially higher education, worldwide since the Industrial Revolution: (a) the number of years of individual education is getting longer and longer; and (b) the number of people receiving education, including college education, is increasing. These two changes eventually lead to the widespread disengagement of young people from society in order to obtain education, knowledge, and qualifications (Lagree, 2007: 3). According to Liu Zaifu, since the end of the 19th century, Chinese intellectuals have experienced the awakening of three major consciousnesses: The awakening of “nation-state” consciousness in the late 19th century to the early 20th century, the awakening of “man–individual” consciousness in the May Fourth Movement, and the awakening of “class-state” consciousness in the 1920s to 1930s. These three awakenings profoundly influenced the appearance and destiny of Chinese society in the 20th century (Liu, 2011). The awakening of the consciousness of “class-state” is a direct result of the popularity of Marxism and its class struggle theory in China after the Russian October Revolution in 1917. The issue of preventing “peaceful evolution” appeared in the secret report of Khrushchev, the 20th leader of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956. Later, after the Soviet controversy in the 1960s, Mao Zedong gradually formed the idea of opposing revisionism, preventing peaceful evolution and training successors. In 1964, Mao Zedong made a special speech on this issue, and the People’s Daily also published an editorial on the issue of “cultivating successors to the revolutionary cause of the proletariat. It is the great plan of proletarian revolution for one hundred years, for one thousand years, for ten thousand years. According to the changes that took place in the Soviet Union, imperialist linguists also placed their hopes for ‘peaceful evolution’ on the third or fourth generation of the Chinese communist party. We must put this imperialist prophecy to ruin. We must train and bring up successors to the revolutionary cause from the top to the bottom in a universal and constant way” (Editorial Department of People’s Daily and Editorial Department of Red Flag magazine, 1964). Although Ma Nuo was widely criticized for her daring performance and earned the title of “gold digger”, tolerance in today’s society is: On the one hand, people admit that Ma Nuo’s “worship of money” is the projection of our era, rather than the “sin” of Ma Nuo herself. On the other hand, people agree that while sitting in a BMW does not necessarily make you smile, sitting on a bicycle definitely doesn’t. This shows that the younger generation living in today’s secular society has understood the meaning of material life and will no longer believe in absolute ascetic values. In Chapter 2 of the first volume of this book, we described the contradiction between the young Mao Zedong and his father and the private school teacher, and how his rebellious spirit against tradition was born. For the radical youth of the May Fourth generation, this is not an individual case, but a phenomenon of universal significance. As Li Wenhai and Liu Yangdong said, “The May Fourth elite who criticize the old family system particularly fiercely often have personal backgrounds. Wu Yu is an example” (Li & Liu, 1992: 223). When Wu Yu was young, he was loved by his grandfather and his mother, but as he grew older, he clashed with his father and other family members over who owned what. In Wu Yu’s own words, “I was framed by the society outside and stung by the elders inside” (Wu, 1985: 335), which triggered his words and deeds in the year of 1911 that were neither filial nor Confucian. Coincidentally, in 1919, Shi Cuntong, a student of Zhejiang First Normal University, caused a great uproar because of his article “No filial piety”. His hatred of traditional

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Chinese culture, his yearning for free and equal anarchic communism, and finally his determination to become a warrior to fight the old system to the end, also originated from his conflict with his indifferent father regarding the treating of his sick mother (Jiang, 1997). Finally, Ba Jin always compared his large family to “an autocratic kingdom”, where “many lovely lives struggled, suffered, languished, moaned to death in the prison of false ethics”. “I am beginning to feel that the current social system is unreasonable. I used to think arrogantly if we could change it and arrange everything better” (Ba, 1982: 94–95). “Small broadcasts” refers to private discussions among comrades about the Party’s political and personnel relations and personal lives, which correspond to the “big broadcasts” like Party propaganda. On December 6, 1942, the General Learning Committee of the CPC Central Committee, which was in charge of the rectification movement, issued a notice on the elimination of small broadcasts in Yan’an. Filling out the small broadcasts questionnaire was a way of organizing and motivating people to explain their daily behavior, which shows that since then, the Party would pay more attention to the thoughts and behaviors of party members and effectively control them. Every educated youth, including me, who went to the countryside, was deeply disappointed to find that the farmers by whom they were supposed to be educated were vastly different from the “poor and middle peasants” that the authorities promoted as their ideal. Richard Madsen mentioned this in his book Morality and Power in a Chinese Village and Michel Bonnin in his book The Lost Generation (Bonnin, 2004: 264–268; Madsen, 1984: 118–125, 145–148). After the 1960s, in order to fight against Soviet revisionism, the CPC Central Committee decided to publish a number of works and literature involving revisionists and Western social theorists in the form of “internal books”. The covers of these books were mainly pure gray, but there were also other colors such as yellow, white, and black. Among them, gray books were mainly theoretical books, such as Bernstein’s The Premise of Socialism and the Task of the Social Democratic Party, Kautsky’s Terrorism and Communism, Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed, Plekhanov’s On the Role of Individuals in History, and Djilas’s The New Class. Yellow books were dominated by literature, especially Soviet literature, such as Thaw by Ehrenburg, The White Ship by Aitmatov, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn, as well as Western literature such as The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger, La Nausee by Sartre, and L’Etranger by Camus. Finally, there were fewer black books, that is, books related to the history of the Communist Party published by the People’s Publishing House in 1980 under the name of “Modern Historical Materials Publishing House”, such as Zhang Guotao’s My Memory, Wang Ming’s Fifty Years of the Communist Party of China, and Chen Gongbo’s Bitter Smile. According to incomplete statistics, the total number of such “covers” reached 2,000 in over 20 years (Shen, 2007). The odd thing was that Mao Zedong, who agreed to publish these books in order to strengthen his critique of revisionism, to strengthen the legitimacy of his theory, or to train the revolutionary successors of the proletariat, actually led a whole generation down the path of “alienation” or reflection. According to Li Chunling et al., among the post-1980s employees, 32.5% are employed in private enterprises, 5.4% in foreign-funded enterprises, and 17.8% are employed in individual industry and commerce or are self-employed. In total, about 55.7% of the post-1980s employees work in non-public institutions (Li, 2013: 347). Of course, the above language is the conventional way of narration for most people who were educated in the countryside or feel frustrated in life. For those few successful people, especially those in politics, emphasizing their experience of going to the countryside, “alliance with workers and peasants”, and expressing “no regrets about youth” is not only a political qualification in the past, but also a political

176 Conclusion expression in the present. As far as collective memory is concerned, since, in every era, this intention is consistent with the dominant thought of society (Halbwachs, 1992: 71), and our dominant ideology today still affirms the importance of this alliance, the vast majority of educated youth, whether frustrated or satisfied or even successful, will naturally continue to construct their collective memory along this dimension. 11 In China’s modern education, although as early as 1935, the national government promulgated the law on the conferment of academic degrees, only nine academic degree examinations were held, and 232 master’s degrees were awarded up until 1949, due to the war. After the founding of the People’s Republic of China, East China Normal University, with the help of experts from the Soviet Union, established the first educational history research institute in 1955. In 1978, after a 12-year hiatus in postgraduate recruitment, the mainland reopened the postgraduate recruitment examination, and in the nearly a quarter century after the promulgation of the regulations of the People’s Republic of China on academic degrees in 1980, postgraduate education developed rapidly. By 2011, China has trained 400,000 doctors and 2.4 million masters (Yang, 2013). Since 2008, China has trained 50,000 doctors every year, surpassing the United States and becoming the world’s largest doctorproducing country. 12 In the two famous universities in Nanjing, there were disagreements and even conflicts between teachers and students in the 1980s over the signing of books and unfair distribution of royalties. The most common version of teacher–student conflict is: The tutor thinks that you are my graduate student and it is natural for you to help me. Graduate students complained, “We write the books, but the teacher is the first author or even the only author; not only that, he scoops up all the payment of the books.” Students never think that their tutors are still associate professors in their 50s and 60s because of the Cultural Revolution. The professors may even not have published any monographs, and be constantly in financial difficulties. 13 In the “Report on the cultural influence of Chinese cities” recently led by my colleague Dr. Chen Yunsong, the research group searched cities involved in English literature in the past 300 years through big data in Google, so as to study the global influence of modern Chinese cities. The first peak of the curve of word frequency of Nanjing (so-called “hot words”) appeared in 1912 after the 1911 revolution, when the nationalist government made Nanjing its capital. As the capital of the nationalist government, Nanjing’s popularity peaked in 1937–1939 (second only to Beijing and Shanghai) and declined thereafter, never making it into the top five again. The top ten cities of contemporary international influence are Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Tianjin, Nanjing, Chengdu, Wuhan and Dalian. (This is the most recent data released in 2020). What is related to our discussion here is that, due to the Youth Olympic Games held in Nanjing in 2014, the word frequency of Nanjing in English literature has had a short “pulse” rise (Xu, 2014).

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Index

1911 revolution 142, 147, 171 1949 revolution 22, 109, 143, 150 academic degrees 176n11 adolescence 41 advertising 27, 38n13, 85–90; growth of industry 87; sells way of life 88–89; social event 86; tv revenue 104n11 Aftershock (film) 15 agriculture 163 American Youth Culture 166 anonymity 56, 57 Anti-Japanese War 142 April Fifth Movement 152 assassinations 141–142 Aung San Suu Kyi 92 Ba, Jin 147, 175n5 back-feeding 45, 118–119 Bai, Chongxi 103n6 Bai, Xianyong 64 Baiyangdian School of Poetry 43, 68n2 Barnett, Homer Garner 103n9 Barrett, Stuart 85 Baudrillard, Jean 26, 28, 89 Bauer, Raymond 85 BBS 55, 56, 59, 60, 99 Becker, Howard 3 Bei, Dao 68n2 Beijing Olympic Games 145–146, 155 Bell, Alexander Graham 76 Bell, Daniel 3–4, 26–27, 28, 88, 89 Bennington Women’s College 41 Bergson, Henry 82 biological generation 156, 157 blogging 60 Bo, Xilai 70n14, 144 bond crossing 59

Bonnin, Michel 42, 43, 68n2, 152, 175n7 Book of Rites 52 bookstore salon 64 Bourdieu, Pierre 138 broadcasting 74–75 see also cable broadcasting buzzwords 56 cable broadcasting 69n11, 102n1 cafes 65 Cao, Jin 96 capitalism 28, 37n5, 38n12; capitalist spirit 132–133 Carlyle, Thomas 8 Castells, Manuel 4–5, 55, 75, 77, 97 CCTV, advertising revenue 104n11 Chai, Jing 64 Charter of the Imperial School 52 Chen, Danqing 64, 65 Chen, Duxiu 53, 107, 137, 156 Chen, Guangbiao 18 Chen, Peihua 151, 152 Chen, Tianhua 141 Chen, Yingfang 124, 138, 140, 141, 142, 147, 151, 152, 156, 170 Chen, Yunsong 176n13 Cheng, Yuanzhong 140 Chiang, Kai-shek 15, 103n6, 108, 135n6 Childhood and Society (Erickson) 45 children: advertising and 87; cyberspace and 95–96; electronic games 95 Children of the Great Depression (Elder) 172 China trend (Naisbitt) 6–7 Chinese feeling/experience 19, 127–134; only here/only once 128–130, 137 church 52 Churchill, Winston 74

188 Index cities 176n13 civil society 60–62, 65–67, 153, 155 class consciousness 68n5 coastal cities 160 coffee houses 65 Cohen, Paul 79, 138 Coleman, James 53–54 Coleman, Ronnie 93–94 collective memory 157–158, 159, 176n10 collectivization 110 college education 69n8; student numbers in China 136n9, 155 College life 44–45 Communist Party of China (CPC) 5, 16, 18, 19, 61, 66, 142, 143, 144, 148, 150, 156, 175n6, 175n8 Communist Youth League of China 143, 174n1 computers: complexity of hardware/ software 99; disadvanages for parents 99–100; knowledge from children 119–121 Comte, Auguste 2, 3 Confucian culture 146–147 Confucian morality 106 Confucianism 107 Confucius 107–108, 147 consanguinity 77 consciousness, three types 166–167 Constitution of the Communist Youth League of China 174n1 consumerism 23–24, 26–30, 89–90 consumption 22–30, 42, 86–87, 104n13; advertising 86–87, 89–90 Cooley, Charles 3, 45, 46, 48–49, 53, 57 cremation 134n1 cultural inheritance 127 cultural lag 130 Cultural Reverse: broadens parents’ horizons 119–127; childrens positive view 115–117; forging new intergenerational relations 156–165; twoway information communication 119–127 Cultural Revolution 5, 49, 111, 113, 129, 144, 152 Culture and Commitment: A Study on Generation Gap (Mead) 166 cyber culture 54–63 Darwin, Charles 3 Das Kapital (Marx) 36n2 dating online 57–58

Davis-Friedmann, Deborah 50, 87, 110, 111, 135n8 democratization 60, 69n12 see also civil society Deng, Xiaoping 5, 6, 7, 8, 15–16, 17, 18, 112, 136n9, 141, 158, 164; southern tour speech 82, 87, 144 Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Vogel) 164 Descartes, René 28 detention and repatriation system 65, 69n13 Dewey, John 72, 103n5 dialogue and communication 160–161 Diary of a Madman 171 digital divide 98–99 Digital Life 95 digital natives/immigrants 90–96; computer printing and 91, 104n15 “Digital ‘natives’ invade the workplace” (Lee) 94 Ding, Ling 148 Ding county experiment 78–79, 103n5 discourse power, computers and 100–102 “diversity” 84 Dong, Jiageng 144 Dunbar, Robin 78, 103n4 Dunbar’s number see Rule of 150 Duo, Duo 43 Durkheim, Emile 3 economic growth and marketization 172 educated youth 42; going to countryside 144, 152, 158, 175nn7&10; literature 43, 152; novel 68n2; poets 68n2; value of struggle 159–160 education: age of youth and 173–174n1; study abroad 25, 43; Westernization of 140 educator/educatee relationship 127, 137 Einstein, Albert 103n5 Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah 42 Elder, Glenn 128, 172 electronic games 95 electronic media 43, 75 “Energy Fun” 51 energy values, information and 97 Engels, Friedrich 4, 8, 24, 29, 36n2 Enlightenment 52–53 Erickson, Eric 45–46, 68n4 Esarey, Ashley and Xiao, Qiang 60 Escape (novel) 43

Index factionalism 67n1 Fairbank, John King 109 families: declining influence of 47–51; traditional family system 49 see also filial piety Fan, Jingyi 34–35, 124 Fan, Ye 64 Fang, Wen 130 fashions trends 80–81, 86–87, 103n7 father-son relationship 107, 135n3 feedback 116, 135n3 Fei, Xiaotong 3, 30–31, 46, 77, 125–126, 127, 147, 161 Feng, Guifen 106 Feng, Tang 64 Feng, Xiaogang 15 Feng, Xiaotian 34 Feng, Yuxiang 103n6 Ferguson, Adam 2, 36n1 Fertility System (Fei) 125 Fifth Generation, The (Wu) 140 filial piety 105–113; irrationality of 106; obeying parents 113–114, 135n2; urban elderly 110 Firth, Raymond 30 flat world 37n11 floating population 32, 112, 163–164 folk salons 65 foot binding 80 Forum 55, 56, 59, 60 Foucault, Michel 149 Fourth Generation, The (Zhang & Cheng) 140 Friedman, Thomas 25–26, 37n11 From Traditional to Modern Man: Personal Change in Six Developing Countries (Inkeles & Smith) 133 funerals 109, 134n1 Gan, Tiesheng 68n2 GDP growth rate 5–6, 29, 87 generation gap 123–124, 130 generation problem 138 generations 5; academic interest 166 Genghis Khan 8 “gentry” class 146–147 Gibson, William and Barlow, John 55 Gillis, John R. 138 global capitalism 87 global village 74, 75 globalization 10, 21–22, 160; digital generation 92–93

189

“Go home and ask my grandson” (Fan) 34–35, 124 Goebbels, Joseph 102n1 Goffman, K. 56, 57 Good Friend (Newspaper) 80–81 Goode, William 47, 48, 49 Goodman, David 135n8 graduate students 161–163, 176nn11&12 grandparents 35–36, 48, 121 Great Depression 128 Great Leap Forward 5, 134n1 great rebellion 144 Greening of America: How the Youth Revolution Re-valued America, The (Reich) 166 grey/yellow-cover books 152, 175n8 Greyser, Stephen 85 Grieder, Jerome 135n7, 141, 148 group identity 46 Gu, Yanxiu 18 Guangming Daily 81 Guo, Yuhua 100, 110 Habermas, Jürgen 63, 65, 66 Halbwachs, M. 157, 176n10 Hall, Stanley 41 Han, Yu 129 He, Riqu 108, 109, 114 Heraclitus 1 Hertel, Mark 49–50 high-speed railway 7, 37n6 Hills, Edward 52, 53 historical events 140–141, 172 History of European Universities (Ruegg) 68n7 history of human society 72 Hitler, Adolf 74, 102nn1&2 Hobsbawm, Eric 4 Hopkins, Claude 38n13 Houlden, Gordon 135n8 household registration system 151, 154 housing loan balance 37n9 “How migrant labor is changing rural China” (Murphy) 164 Hu, Fuming 81 Hu, Juewen 18 Hu, Shi 53, 63, 107, 135n7 Hu, Yong 91 Hu, Zi’ang 18 Hua, Guofeng 103n8 Huang, Wansheng 1 Huang, Zunxian 80

190 Index Huangfu, Ping 81 human communication, timeline 72–74 Hundred Days Reform 141 Hyman, Herbert 41 hypertext and meta-language 55 identity 45–47, 68n4 If You Are the One (dating show) 104n11, 120, 145 imperial examination system 52; abolition of 53, 139 Industrial Revolution 26; emerence of youth and 138 industrialization 32, 47, 50 information, power of 96–102 information and communication technology (ICT) 4–5, 77, 145 information explosion 97, 104n16 information revolution 96, 98, 101 information society 97–98; volume of data 104n16 Inglehart, Ronald 26, 30, 172–173 inheritance, jobs and property 109–110 Inkeles, Alex and Smith, David H. 78, 79, 82, 133–134 Innis, Harold 72 instrumental rational behavior 133 Intellectuals and Modern China (Grieder) 148 intergenerational conflict 9–10 intergenerational tilt 119 internal books 152, 175n8 Internet 4, 54, 75; chatrooms 59; intergenerational divide in access 99–101; peer groups in cyberspace 54–62; public space for youth 155; users in China 77, 99 iPads/iPhones 95 IQ and diligence 129–130 IRC (Internet Relay Chat) 56 Isaacs, Harold 46 jealousy 84, 103n9 Jews and Modern Capitalism, The (Bell) 28 Ji, Di 64 Jia, Zhangke 64 Jiang, He 68n2 Jiang, Xipei 18 Jiefang Daily 81 Jin, Shenghua 162–163 Jin, Yihong 32, 43 Jin, Yuelin 63

Journal of Jiangsu Administrative College 136n11 justification 106 Kang, Youwei 107, 141 Kato, Yoshikazu 64 Kennedy, John F. 102n2 Khrushchev, Nikita 174n3 “knock-off products” 29 knowledge: new 13; reservoir 45 Kuomintang 143, 147, 148, 149, 151, 156 Lagree, Jean-Charles 165–166 Lai, Shengchuan 6, 36n4, 64 Latham, Michael E. 36n3 134 Lee, Rainie 94 Lei, Feng 14, 90, 144, 151, 152 Lenin, Vladimir 8, 150 Lerner, Daniel 78 LeVine, Robert 41 Levinson, Paul 74, 75, 102n2 Li, Anyou 69n12 Li, Chunling 154, 175n9 Li, Dazhao 107, 156 Li, Hongzhang 158 Li, Li 43, 63 Li, Peilin 136n10 Li, Tuo 63 Li, Wenhai 174n5 Li, Yinhe 64 Li, Zehou 142, 146 Li, Zongren 103n6 Liang, Bi 141 Liang, Qichao 53, 80, 141, 171, 173 Liang, Sicheng 63 Liang, Wendao 64, 65 life course theory (Elder) 172 Lin, Huiyin 63 Ling, Zhijun 20, 81 Liu, Guili 31 Liu, Jingming 33 Liu, Shaoqi 8, 15, 144, 151 Liu, Yangdong 174n5 Liu, Yaqiu 159 Liu, Yu 64 Liu, Zaifu 142, 174n2 Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing Character of the American People, The (Riseman) 39, 71, 89 Longevity: The Old in China and Communism (Davis-Friedmann) 135n1 “looking-glass” concept 57

Index Lost Generation, The (Bonnin) 175n7 Louis Vuitton bags 37n10 Love on a Two Way Street 36n4 Lu, Xun 107, 122, 124, 135n7, 171–172 Luo, Yijun 64 luxury goods 29, 37n10, 38n14, 104n13 Ma, Licheng 81 Ma, Nuo 145, 174n4 Madsen, Richard 30, 150, 175n7 Mang, Ke 43 Mannheim, Karl 14, 141 manual labor 149 Mao, Zedong: cable broadcasting 102n1; collectivization and 17; on Confucianism 107; death of 15; and father 174n5; funerals 134n1; radical youth 141; rebellious spirit of 109, 152; Red Guards and 67n1, 144; revisionism and 174n3, 175n8; revolutionary youth 140; symbol of authority 150; two whatevers 103n8; young intellectuals 143, 149 market economy 19, 111, 112, 144, 145, 154, 158 market socialism 87 marketization 32–33, 50, 156, 172 marriage 31, 109, 150 Marx, Karl 3, 8, 24, 28–29, 36n2 Marxism, spread of 142 mass production movement 149 materialism and hedonism 27 May Fourth Movement 49, 106, 107, 108, 113, 129, 135n7, 141, 142, 149, 156, 174n2; radical youth of 174n5 McCarthyism 36n3 McLuhan, Marshall 72, 74, 75, 76, 101, 102n2 Mead, George 46 Mead, Margaret 11, 43, 141, 166, 167 media 43, 44; advertising 85–90; digital divide 98–99; digital natives/immigrants 90–96; extension of senses 76, 102n3; impact of west 79; information power 96–102; promotion ability 71; revolutions 75; significance of 71–79; social opening-up 79–84 Meeker, Mary 60 Megatrend (Naisbitt) 6 mentorship system 161 Middle Ages 52 middle class 22, 23–24, 28, 30, 36n5, 65, 90 migrant workers 32, 98, 155, 164–165

191

Milgram, Stanley 78, 103n4 Ming dynasty 147 minimal-group paradigm 46–47 Mo, Yan 64, 65 mobile phones 77; information revolution 98 Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything, The (Saylor) 96 modernity 1–3, 78, 133–134 modernization 2–3, 5, 36n3, 47 money 38n12, 133, 174n4 Morality and Power in a Chinese Village (Madsen) 175n7 Morse, Samuel 76 multiculturalism 145 Murphy, Rachel 164 Naisbitt, John 1, 6, 37n5 Nanjing 36n4; song of educated youth 68n3; tree preservation movement 61–62; Youth Olympic Games 168–170, 176n13 National Entrance Examination 140 Nazi propaganda 102n1 Negroponte, Nicholas 69n10, 71, 94, 95, 128 net friends 55 netizens 56, 58, 60, 62 network culture 54, 57 network technology 54, 91, 145 Neuromancer (Gibson) 55 New Life Movement 108 New Traditionalism in Communist Society (Walters) 37n8 New Youth 107 Newcomb, Theodore 41 newspapers 74, 77, 78, 79; advertising and 85; Shiwu Newspaper 80 NGOs 61, 66, 155 Nian, Guangjiu 18 Nietzsche, Friedrich 149 Nissan 5 Nixon, Richard 102n2 North Korea 129 novels 43, 68n2 obedience 105, 113–114, 135n2 occupational acquisition system 154 Ogburn, William Fielding 130 Ogilvy, David 86, 90, 104n14 On Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism (Stalin) 36n2 On Teaching 129

192 Index On Tradition (Shils) 14–15 one-child policy 32, 33–34, 43, 50, 112–113, 119, 145 “One-way Street” bookstore 64 online games 57–58, 91 see also electronic games online human flesh search 58–59 only here/only once 128–130, 137 open society 82–83 Opium Wars 106, 139 Ouyang, Hai 144 Pan, Mingxiao 43 parent-child relationship 50; feedback 116, 135n3; filial piety 105–113; intergenerational tilt 30–36, 119; obedience 113–114, 135n2; standing on shoulders of children 122; status and dignity 118; substitution 68n6 parental authority 105, 113–118 parents: “backfeeding” by children 45, 118–119; rapidity of change and 128 Pareto, Vilfredo 8 Paris University 52 Park, Robert 126 Parsons, Talcott 2–3, 41, 42, 47–48 Passing of Traditional Society, The (Lerner) 78 patriarchy 31, 49–50, 146, 147–148 peaceful evolution 144, 174n3 Peach Blossom Land 36n4 peer groups 39–67; adolescence 41; civil society 60–62; college life 44–45; cyber culture 54–63; generational identity 39–47; identity 45–47; influence hypothesis 41; Red Guard movement 42; salons 63–67; studying abroad 43; teenagers 41–42; virtuality of 55; youth culture 41–42 Peng, Jiazhen 141 people’s communes 14, 17, 110 People’s Daily 81, 103n8, 174n3 People’s Liberation Army Daily 103n8 Perry, Elizabeth 135n8 Phelan, Patricia 59 PLA Daily 81 Plato 52 “play labor” 95, 96 poetry 43, 68n2 Popper, Karl 82 population growth 4; S-curve 39–40 Porter, David 86 post-70s generation 29, 43, 67

post-80s generation 29, 43, 67 post-90s generation 29, 43, 67, 146 Poster, Mark 86 “Practice is the only criterion for testing truth” (Hu) 81 Prensky, Mike 91–92, 94–95 Preston’s law 38n15 printing 74, 75; invention of 96 Protestant ethic 27, 132 Protestant Ethic and the Spirits of Capitalism, The (Weber) 132 psychological cognition 75, 77 public domain/space 59, 63, 64, 65, 67, 155 Pye, Lucian 105, 108–109 Qian, Xuantong 107, 135n7 Qin, Xiao 16, 18–19 Qing dynasty 52, 80, 138, 139, 141, 147, 158, 171, 172 Qiu, Jin 141 radical youth 140, 141, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150, 157–158, 172, 174n5 radio 74, 75, 76, 78, 79, 102n1 rebel youth 141, 144, 151, 152, 153, 158, 159, 172 Red Flag (magazine) 103n8, 174n3 Red Guard movement 42, 43, 67n1, 68n7, 140, 144, 152 Redfield, Robert 3 “reference group” theory 41 Regent, Zaifeng 141 Reich, Charles A. 166–167 Reischauer, Edwin 109 religious/spiritual values 132–133 Ren, Jianyu 65–66, 70n14 Ren, Yi 68n3 respect 135n4 revolutionary youth 140, 141, 142, 143, 149, 150, 151–152, 157–158, 172, m 149 Riesman, David 28, 39–40, 71–72, 89 Rise of the Network Society, The (Castells) 4–5 rites and customs 109, 157 Riyue, Guanghua 55 Rogers, Everett M. 72, 74 Rong, Qing 139 Rong, Yiren 18 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 74, 102n1 Ruegg, Walter 52, 53, 68n7 Ruin (novel) 43 Rule of 150 78, 103n4

Index Rural China (Fei) 125 rural construction movement 78, 79, 103n5 S-curve 39–40 Saint-Simon, Henri de 2, 36n1 salons 63–67 Saylor, Michael 96–97, 101, 102, 104n16 schools: declining influence of 47–48, 69n9; emergence of 52; extension of formal schooling 53 Schramm, Wilbur 79 Schurmann, Franz 31, 150 Second Handshake, The (Zhang) 68n2 secular youth 141, 144–146, 153, 158, 172 Seventeen (magazine) 41–42, 87 Shanghai TV 103n10 Shanghai World Expo 146 Shen, Congwen 63 Shen, Yifei 49 Sherif, Muzafer 47 Shi, Cuntong 147, 174n5 Shi, Hang 64 Shi, Tianjian 69n12 Shi, Zhiyu 132 Shils, Edward 13, 14–15, 48, 52, 53 Shiwu Newspaper 80 Shuimu, Tsinghua 55 Sinatra, Frank 41 Sino-Japanese war (1896) 80 “Six degrees of separation” theory 78, 103n4 small broadcasts 150, 175n6 social identity theory, European 46 social mentality 14, 19, 130, 131, 136n11 social opening-up 79–84 social status 24, 28, 48 “social transition” 59 socialization 48, 57, 59 Socrates 52 Sorokin, Pitirim 3 Soros, George 82 Soviet Union 151 Spencer, Herbert 2, 3 Spirit of Chinese Politics, The (Pye) 109 spiritual growth, peer group communication and 44 Stalin, Joseph 36n2, 74, 144, 150 Star Six Party 63 students, number in Chinese schools 140 studying abroad 43, 53 substitution 68n6 Sun, Benwen 49 Sun, Liping 16

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Sun, Yat-sen 61, 108, 135n6 Sun, Zhigang 65, 69n13 “Super Voice Girls” 145 symbiosis 126, 160, 161 symbolic meaning of goods 23, 24, 27, 28 Tajfel, Henry 46–47 Tan, Sitong 107, 141 Tang dynasty 52, 129 Tao, Dongfeng 85 Taoism 107 teachers: decline of school tradition or influence 69n9; teacher–student conflict 176n12; teacher–student interaction 69n9, 161–162 technological determinism 72 teenagers 41–42; advertising and 86–87 telegraph 75, 76; advent of 96 telephones 76–77, 96 television 97; advertising and 86, 103n10; promotes rationality 75, 102n2; viewing figures 104n12 “The generation problem” (Mannheim) 14 “The song of the educated youth in Nanjing” 43, 68n3 Thompson, Edward 47, 68n5 Three People’s Principles 108 Tian, Qinxin 64 Tiananmen Square massacre (1989) 144, 145 Tocqueville, Alexis de 3 Today 68n2 Toffler, Alvin 4, 5, 10 tolerance 83–84, 125 Tolerance (Van Loon) 84 Tonnies, Ferdinand 3, 77 Toynbee, Arnold 8, 89 Treasure Island Family, The 6 tree preservation movement 61–62 “Two whatevers” 81, 103n8 Ultraman (animated film) 135n5 underground art salon 43, 63 underground literature 43, 152 underground poetry 68n2 Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McLuhan) 72 universities: academic degrees 176n11; enrollment numbers in China 44, 69n8, 128, 136n9, 155; European 68n7; mentorship 161–162; peer groups 44–45; Soviet model 151 University of Bologna 52, 68n7

194 Index urban elderly 110 urban/rural families 163–164 urbanization 32, 38n15, 50 Van Loon, Willem 84 Veblen, Thorstein 28, 90 Vico, Giambattista 2, 36n1 Vietnam 129 virtual peer group 54, 55, 57, 59, 60 virtual worlds/cyberspace 95 Vogel, Ezra Feivel 87, 111, 164 voluntary/civil organizations 155 Wan, Li 17 Wang, Jingwei 141 Wang, Kangnian 80 Wang, Shi 6 Wang, Shiwei 148 Wang, Wulong 61, 62 War of Resistance against Japan 108, 148 Weber, Max 2, 3, 8, 28, 132–133, 172 Wei, Junyi 150 Wei, Yuan 106 Wenchuan earthquake 145–146, 155 Western Zhou dynasty 52 Westernization 79, 106–107; education 140; impact of youth and 138–140; media 79 Wheeler, William 126 Whyte, Martin 14, 110, 135n6, 144 Williams, Friedrich 54 wine industry, online shopping and 100–101 women 103n7; fashion trends 81, 103n7; foot binding 80 workers and peasants 143, 149 worship of money 26, 38n12, 174n4 writing 75 Wu, Junping 140 Wu, Liande 80 Wu, Yu 147, 174n5 Wu, Yue 141–142 Wu, Zhihui 135n7, 148 Wuxu Reform (1898) 141 Xi, Chuan 64 Xi, Jinping 153 Xi, Zhongxun 17 Xiamen XP event 60 Xiao, Baihe 55 Xiao, Jun 148–149 Xing, Yanzi 144

Xinhua News Agency 81 Xiong, Peiyun 64 Xu, Fuguan 106, 114 Xu, Haoyuan 43, 63 Xu, Xilin 141 Xu, Zhimo 63 Xu, Zhiyuan 64 Xuncius 71 Yan, Geling 64 Yan, Yangchu 78, 79, 103n5 Yan, Yunxiang 112 Yang, Dacai 58–59 Yang, Xiuqiong 103n7 Yang, Zhongfang 114 Yao, Hongye 141 Ye, Fei 17 Ye, Fu 64, 65 Ye, Guanghui 114 Yong, Zhiren 18 young intellectuals 142–143, 147, 148, 149–150 youth 137–146; age of 173n1; historical role of 150; impact of West 138; peer groups 53–54; product of modern school education 53; social structure 137–138; traditional Chinese society 138 “Youth” and Social Changes in China (Chen) 140 youth culture 41–42, 48, 53–54; American 166 Youth Olympic Games 168–170, 176n13 youth subculture 42, 43, 47 “youth without regret” 158–159 Yu, Keping 6 Yu, Xiuhua 64 Yuan, Shikai 139, 147, 171 Yue, Zhong 43 Zhai, Zhigang 7 Zhang, Baixi 139 Zhang, Fakui 103n6 Zhang, Guotao 156, 175n8 Zhang, Jiping 64 Zhang, Ming 64, 65 Zhang, Xiruo 63 Zhang, Xun 171 Zhang, Yang 68n2 Zhang, Yongjie 140 Zhang, Yueran 64 Zhang, Zhidong 139 Zhao, Haijun 15

Index Zhejiang village 33, 44, 112, 118 Zheng, Yefu 30 Zhou, Enlai 15, 141 Zhou, Jiugeng 58–59 Zhou, Shitao 18

Zhou, Yang 148, 149 Zhou, Yongming 60 Zhou, Zuoren 107 Zhu, De 15, 103n6 Zhu, Guangqian 63

195